Massey Hall isn’t ‘just another gig’

Former frontman for Hey Rosetta! is on tour to promote his ’70s-inspired album, ‘The Festival’

The current battering the population is taking at the hands of the traditional cold-and-flu season is entirely predictable when one recalls that everyone just had a forced respite from germs — not to mention human company in general — for the better part of two years.

Knowing that certainly doesn’t make the reality of the situation any easier on, say, touring musicians suddenly back in the game of ripping from town to town and crowd to crowd in cramped vans on fitful sleep and dubious diets. Which brings us to the wearier-than-usual Tim Baker we encountered wheezing and coughing down a shaky cellular line from Chattanooga, Tenn., earlier this week.

“I guess you’re right. I didn’t encounter any bacteria whatsoever for two years, yeah. And here I am on the road encountering crowds of people every night and all manner of strange germs,” laughed Baker. “I got a flu or a cold or something in Edmonton and it wasn’t much. I mean, I was ruined for 24 hours, basically, and I had to cancel Saskatoon because I could hardly stand up and I couldn’t really breathe. But I beat it in a day. And then we played Winnipeg and it was a great show, went south of the border and played Minneapolis and played Madison and I felt fine, played Chicago and I felt fine — not great, but not too bad — but then it just got worse and worse and worse.”

By Nashville, the Newfoundland singer/songwriter and former Hey Rosetta! frontman was forced to throw in the towel, cancelling a handful of U.S. solo dates — “which is my nightmare,” he lamented — and retreat to his sister’s to convalesce while his band headed back to Canada in preparation for a run of dates in London, Ottawa and Montreal this week crowned by a headlining Tim Baker and All Hands gig at Massey Hall with Eric Slick and Nico Paulo in Toronto this Friday.

It’s a big gig for Baker and proof positive of the genuine love that lingers in this nation for Hey Rosetta!, the St. John’s, N.L., septet who split up amicably after 12 years together in 2017 just before it properly cracked wide enough to turn into Newfoundland’s very own all-in answer to Broken Social Scene or Arcade Fire.

That band’s audience has stuck with him now for two pensive, carefully crafted solo albums audibly enthralled with the pastel sounds of the 1970s Laurel Canyon scene, 2019’s “Forever Overhead“and this year’s big warm hug of a sleeper “The Festival,” released in early October via Toronto singer/songwriter Donovan Woods’s End Times Music label.

“I’d like to be in shape for it, yeah,” said Baker of the Massey Hall show. “I love it. I love the room. I’ve had only great shows in there before and I hear it’s even greater now that it’s been redone and I look forward to it very much. It’s a very big, meaningful show. I’m trying not to build it up too much in my mind. I keep saying ‘Yeah, it’s just another gig,’ y’know? ‘We’ve got 25 other gigs on this tour.’ But it’s been the big one in everyone’s minds the whole time. I cannot wait.

“So, yeah, it’s beautiful to be back at Massey at that sort of level that the band was at when it dissolved. And I miss those guys all the time and I miss what we had, but I’m also just so delighted to be out with the band that I’m out with and that I put together this project with all of my experience from Hey Rosetta!”

Work on “The Festival” was already well under way when the international touring cycle for “Forever Overhead” ended in March of 2020, just in time for everything to shut down and stall any forward momentum that anyone might have had for anything.

Baker knew he wanted to make another record in the same Jackson-Browne-meets-Patrick-Watson vein as his first solo outing, which he made while briefly living in Toronto with support from local pillar Ben Whiteley and such virtuosic Montrealers as Suuns’ Liam O’Neill, Watson sidemen Miskha Stein and Joe Grass and Arcade Fire/National producer Marcus Paquin.

“I really enjoyed what I found, which was this sound that hearkened back to the capital-S ‘singer/ songwriters’ of the 1970s, I guess, and the stuff that I grew up listening to,” said Baker. “I kind of went back to try to find what my sound would be if it wasn’t for Hey Rosetta! So I went back to the very beginning of music in my mind, which was listening to music with my dad and all that sort of stuff. So I really did fall in love with that palette and those breezy ’70s songs and arrangements and I wanted to do another one in that style right away. But it didn’t happen right away. It never seems to happen right away for me.”

Pandemic aside, the album’s final creation was further delayed by a “pilgrimage” that all Newfoundlanders dream of making back to his hometown of St. John’s —— where Baker now resides permanently once again — and a postmove breakup. Although, it should be noted, none of that stopped him from coming up with enough material along the way for “a smaller record next year that’s about moving and that kind of pilgrimage.”

Meantime, Baker is grateful to once again be enjoying the warmth of community, musical and otherwise, symbolized by the title “The Festival” and long yearned for during COVID isolation.

“The pandemic was a fairly thankless time to be a musician. I was very hungry for a few claps for a couple of years. I love claps, y’know?” said Baker. “And this tour has been tough. The turnout in Canada has been good, but not as good as it was before the pandemic. And the turnouts in the States have been kinda tough. We’ve had some good shows, but we’ve had a few thin shows — like, some demoralizing, thin shows. And it’s hard not to get a little existential about it all, playing to nobody in Madison, Wisconsin, at 40.

“But some days it’s miraculous. We played Chicago the other day and I hadn’t played Chicago — I hadn’t played the States — with the band and my new project, ever. The last time I played that stage was with Hey Rosetta! and there were people there who were, like, ‘We’ve been waiting for you to come back. It’s been so long.’ And I’d played there seven years ago, like, one time. And here they were again. So on one hand, I’m thinkin’ ‘Oh, man, no one’s coming to the shows. I’ve lost it.’ And on the other hand, I’m just, like, ‘It’s a miracle you guys are here.’ Seven years later? That’s amazing.

“So I’ve been doing my best to give everything at every show, even to 17 people in Madison, where we played for an hour-and-a-half and I sang myself sick.”