All the World Fades Away Jim Cuddy

• 1Learn to Live Alone04:33
• 2You Belong05:10
• 3Anywhere Else But Home04:46
• 4Impossible03:49
• 5All the World Fades Away04:51
• 6Scars05:41
• 7Too Far Gone04:43
• 8Torn04:14
• 9Everyday Angels03:09
• 10Good News03:40
• 11Holding It Down04:03
• 12Say Goodbye04:46
• Total Runtime53:25

Info zu All the World Fades Away

How do you chronicle a life, especially as a widely acclaimed musician with a thousand hair-raising stories to tell, while simultaneously and simply documenting the present moment? And why would anyone assign themselves such a task?

As Jim Cuddy discovered making his dazzling new album, All The World Fades Away, that particular songwriting mission was less an option than an imperative, one that came for the Blue Rodeo co-founder out of a rare abundance of time to reflect, tinker, and create. Sure, most rootsy singer-songwriter albums detail what the artist sees looking up, down, and around. But All The World Fades Away goes deeper, its windscreen is wider, maybe because Cuddy is that rare musician with decades to draw from and whose story is very much an arc in progress.

“You sort of enter a dream state when you begin writing. And I’ve begun to wonder why some images have stayed with me over the years and others haven’t. So yes, this album is about looking back,” Cuddy shares from his hometown Toronto. “However, I tried to make sure the record is affirming of life as it is now, reflecting how much I like where I’m at today. It’s not wrapping up or being nostalgic for old times. It’s just… surveying.”

While most songs on All The World Fades Away map Cuddy’s unique compendium of memories and the emotions they stir, few marshal the sheer impact of the magisterial, tender “Impossible,” one of the album’s standout tracks. “It’s a song for Jill Daum, wife of John Mann of Spirit of the West. She lost her husband quite young.” After beating colorectal cancer in 2011, Mann succumbed to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2019 at just 57. “Jill and John’s son has struggled with mental health and lived on the street for a while. That’s an enormous amount of difficulty heaped on one person. A parent is only as happy as their least happy child. I ran the song past Jill, who asked her son, who then wrote me a letter saying he understood it was about the undying love a parent has for their child. That was all the endorsement I needed. I have played that song a lot and it’s remarkable who comes and talks to me about it afterwards. You just never know who is struggling with these issues.”

Fittingly for an album “surveying” the past, All The World Fades Away explores many relationships. Witness the album’s radiant openers, “Learn to Live Alone” and “You Belong.” Each examines different connections separated by decades but threaded through Cuddy’s personal narrative.

“If I were to look at the evolution of my very long relationship with my wife [actor Rena Polley], we have spent a lot of time apart,” Cuddy says of musically buoyant but slightly tear-stained”Learn to Live Alone,” which soars on his falsetto in the chorus. “Independence has become one of the foundational pieces of our relationship, and it has shaped the way we live. When I see other couples that do everything together, I can’t help but wonder how that’s possible.”

Then comes the pensive ballad “You Belong” which chronicles a romance from Cuddy’s early years. “This record was written with no deadline at our little country place during the pandemic. I had a lot of time to examine things and some of those things included past relationships. And yes, what’s described in the song happened,” Cuddy says, referring to bumping into the ex-lover at an event, where she blanked on his name. “I have no intention of rekindling anything but what was established in the time we spent together is as present now as it was then.” Cuddy chuckles when asked Polley’s reaction to the song. “She’s not threatened by it. She knows this is art and not biography.”

The prolonged gestation of the three-years-in-the-making All The World Fades Away helps explain Cuddy’s reflective mindset. Hitting pause on his solo record, Cuddy took time to record and tour with Blue Rodeo. However, in the summer of 2023, Cuddy got the band back together at The Woodshed Studio to complete the album. Co-producers Tim Vesely and Colin Cripps-also on guitar-were joined by drummer Joel Anderson, bassist Bazil Donovan, violinist Anne Lindsay, keyboardist Steve O’Connor and a marquee roster of guests including vocalist Jenn Grant.

“Colin and I have worked together from the very beginning so that’s very symbiotic. And Tim, who added percussion and vocals across the record, is brilliant. He helps us decide musical questions.”

Jenn Grant’s involvement with the project expanded beyond her vocal contribution on “Scars” after she gifted Cuddy a video for the song. Her multi-disciplinary work as both a visual artist and a musician gave her a singular perspective on Cuddy’s music. She ended up creating several videos for the album, bringing her unique visual style to support and highlight the powerful songwriting on the album.

Where one finds Cuddy, one often finds Keelor though rarely in the comically smug and sarcastic form captured by the new track “Everyday Angels.” It’s a chiming, guitar and violin-goosed corker that posits Cuddy as our “aw-shucks” protagonist guilelessly musing about this and that while Keelor snidely mocks him in call-and-response vocals. “It certainly has our shared humour,” Cuddy howls. “I sent the song to Greg; he sent it back with a few Beatles-inspired bits and we recorded it.”

He continues. “When Blue Rodeo started, I wrote songs with the intention of playing them live. But as things have gone along, I write them more as short stories. That kind of evolution takestime and concentration, which I enjoyed with this record.”

And where should it be filed in bricks-and-mortar record shops? “I guess I’d like to see it filed wherever John Prine is filed,” Cuddy says. “There’s something perfect about his songs. They have a straightforward harmonic structure and are told simply, but they have impact. That’s what I’m going for, too.”

Jim Cuddy

Jim Cuddy
For over 35 years, Jim Cuddy has written songs that have become indelible in the soundtrack of Canadian lives. With the release of his fourth solo album, Constellation, he adds ten songs to that extraordinary songbook.

As one of the founding members and creative forces behind Blue Rodeo, Cuddy has received nearly every accolade Canada can bestow upon a musician, from the Order of Canada and induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, to countless JUNO Awards and a Star on Canada’s Walk of Fame. Behind it all, is a simple devotion to his craft as a songwriter, which remains Cuddy’s tireless pursuit after more than three decades.

“I’ve always found fascination in the smallest details of human behavior,” says Cuddy of his songwriting. “It has been something that I look at and remember, whether it is the details of an exchange that I witnessed or an exchange that I have. Of course, as you get older there are bigger things that happen in your life that you realize you’ll never totally understand. There never seems to be a loss of things to write about.”

Constellation was recorded during the summer and fall of 2017 at Blue Rodeo’s East-end Toronto headquarters, The Woodshed. As is the case with all great songwriters, Cuddy’s music has taken on deeper meaning with the passage of time, no small feat considering he has penned some of the most memorable songs in our nation’s canon. What comes across on Constellation is less of a separation between the bitter and the sweet, as is sometimes evident with Blue Rodeo, but rather an emotional honesty that resonates across the album. On the album’s many memorable moments, such as “While I Was Waiting,” “Lonely When You Leave” and “Cold Cold Wind”, Cuddy’s unmistakable personality shines through, a testament to how his sound has always resisted attempts to be categorized. This honesty shines through on the title track, “Constellations”.

“’Constellations’ is about a friend of mine who passed away last year. Some friends and I took him up to my farm and we sort of had our last supper. We had a riotous time, we drank a lot of wine, and we had a lot of laughs, and it was all tempered with the fact that we knew that our friend was not going to survive this illness.

I think all the songs on the album were tempered by that because there’s something very sobering about losing a friend, especially losing a friend that’s younger, because it makes you tally up mortality a bit. What it made me do on this record is write some more definitive truths for myself. Write things that had wounded me. Write things that I loved and held onto and write about things I had lost.”

Loss is certainly the theme of the beautiful ballad “You Be The Leaver” which takes on the shock of sudden separation in a relationship, though not necessarily a romantic relationship. “I think in everyone’s life there are relationships that become troubled, and either you survive or you don’t. There are all kinds of relationships that have a great impact on your life, not just the romantic ones.”

Cuddy’s creative drive led him, in 1998, to launch a solo career in conjunction with Blue Rodeo. With Constellation, he continues to find new ways to balance personal reflection and plainspoken storytelling, remaining both intimate and accessible. The new album also reunites him with his long-time band featuring stalwart Blue Rodeo bassist Bazil Donovan, guitarist Colin Cripps, violinist Anne Lindsay, keyboardist Steve O’Connor and drummer Joel Anderson, all of whom, along with and guest musicians Oh Susanna and Jim Bowskill help make this one of Cuddy’s most musically diverse albums to date.

Indeed, one of the album’s musical highlights is Beggar’s Banquet-influenced “Cold Cold Wind,” a traditional country styled track that ends in a flash and fury.

“By the time I finished the song, I thought you know what, this needs to have some explosive life at the end. And so I just started playing that little lick, and realized we also had two extraordinary guitar players in the room, with Jimmy Bowskill and Colin Cripps, and thought it would be fun to have a guitar gunslinger moment at the end. You need to have a bit of punctuation on the meaning of the song. Plus it was an opportunity for those two guys to inspire each other and play off each other.”

Yet, the top shelf playing never overshadows Cuddy’s writing, and the symbiotic relationship between the two is a further tribute to the distinctive Toronto roots rock sound that Blue Rodeo all but defined. As Cuddy explains, “For me, one of the joys in making a record happens when I get past the point of worrying about all the things I may or may not have done wrong, and I can sit back and really absorb and appreciate what everyone else’s contribution. There were so many moments like that on this record, where parts were laid down that really accentuated the emotional impact of a particular song. You only get that with a certain caliber of musician, and I’m fortunate to have them in both bands I’m in.”

That sense of trust is evident in Cuddy’s audience as well, especially those who have been along for the ride from the beginning. His keen ear for conveying the highs and lows inherent to all long-term relationships has helped listeners grow along with him.

“We’ve all had to deal with our own bumps and bruises and scarring along the way, and part of this new record is facing that reality,” he says. “But in other ways Constellation is a celebration of coming through it all and feeling grateful for these long-term relationships that have sustained us throughout our lives.”

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