Tom Wilson: 'The world hasn't beaten me down'

Tom Wilson usually paints his own cover artwork, but for the new Lee Harvey Osmond record, he was the canvas.

Beautiful Scars is covered by a stark photograph of the Hamilton howler's face, his cheeks smeared with war paint and his eyes fixed on the camera.

"I feel more vibrant as an artist and a human being than I ever have.- Tom Wilson

It's emblematic of Wilson's swaggeringly ferocious artistic outlook lately.

"I still feel like I'm ready to fight," an animated Wilson said recently down the line from Vancouver, where he was touring.

"I feel more vibrant as an artist and a human being than I ever have — at the age of 55, and a grandfather.

"That's usually the time when people want to pat you on the head and lead you down into the grave. You're walking that line where you're going to be putting on a straw hat and a pair of baggy pants and waddling out on stage.

"But the matter of fact is, I still have a lot of punk rock in me, man. The world hasn't beaten me down. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I feel like I've been in a car accident, but other than that, I'm doing pretty good."

Inspiration from the past

The simmering, tactile "Beautiful Scars" was buoyed by a series of casual collaborative songwriting sessions with the likes of Colin James, Scarlett Jane's Andrea Ramolo and Wilson's own son, Thompson, with production handled by Cowboy Junkies' Michael Timmins.

For lyrical inspiration, Wilson dug deeply into his past. The "Twin Peaks" shuffle "Blue Moon Drive," for one example, finds Wilson recalling his initial move to L.A. as a young man, when he "lived off chili dogs, sold hash to tourists and played guitar outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre."

Wilson has made a habit of probing his past recently, after signing a deal to pen a memoir for Doubleday Canada.

And he has no shortage of inspiration.

A three-time Juno Award winner — having won both as a member of Junkhouse and Blackie and the Rodeo Kings — Wilson arrived at a revelation three years ago that spun his world.

Wilson was raised by adoptive parents, but what he didn't realize was the woman he had always considered his cousin was, in fact, his birth mother.

He's working through the revelation for the book (written with help from ex-Rheostatics frontman Dave Bidini and due out in February 2017).

What hasn't changed, however, is his relationship with the woman he now knows is his birth mother.

"I promised her nothing would change," he explained.

Secret kept for 55 years

"This is a woman that kept this secret for 55 years. She's a grandmother, and she's a great grandmother, and she still didn't crack.

"Listen, if it was you or me, we probably at the Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner table, we'd say: 'All right, everybody sit down for a minute — you're going to want to hear this.' But she never did. She was iron-willed.

"Everybody in the family loves her. She came to the Junos with me. We had a great time. I feel closer to her.

"I think, if anything in all this, I've learned patience and more understanding and my heart has opened up that much more. And not to tie your story together but: there's the beautiful scars."