Succeeder by Michael Cloud Duguay

It is an island, tough and pretty. A tenacious little place that resists the monstrous yawn of the metropole. True, it suffers blight, stretches of unlovely sprawl, but from its soft centre issues a warm and honeyed whistle. The place deals in poles: a grisly spring – a handsome, exalted autumn. It is bullfrogs in reeds and trucks on the drag. It’s a blue-white winter. It’s an insect whining for heat. It smells like cedar and cereals, mud and lea. It’s perspective: from the tops of its hills, down its long, straight roads, along its scintillating, meandering rivers. I defend it to anyone.

It should be said that this place isn’t really a place, but that’s how it seems, so why not keep shrinking it to its essence? Let it live up to metaphor, with the negative and the positive charges. What I mean to say is that it’s hard to stay long, but harder to leave forever. I wonder if most people experience the same strain. “All my changes were there.” Maybe not all, but this there contains transformations anyhow. One is lucky to feel at home in their evolution. This is how it is, the land between, the end of the rapids: precious and profane.

– Sarah Messerschmidt (2024)


Since the early 2000's, the Canadian singer, composer and producer Michael Cloud Duguay has been weaving his curious aural nest with stray bits plucked from country music, rock, traditional musics, electronic genres, jazz of all stripes, spiritual music, and assorted experimentalisms. His approach has always been immediately recognizable and affable to the ears, but also strange and bewildering. Equally disarming has been the habitual candour with which he speaks about his struggles with mental health, addiction, and homelessness.

As such, at first blush the title of his forthcoming LP Succeeder might seem glib or self-effacing. In actual fact, it extends directly from his characteristic frankness. The record unabashedly celebrates where he came from and his future trajectory as well as his community. Fittingly, it also serves to announce Watch That Ends The Night, his new label alongside lauded Nova Scotian musician Andrew McKelvie (New Hermitage, Scions, Jerry Granelli).

Suceeder is an affirmation of working on one's own terms and with one's own resources. It's also a meditation on the subject of home—growing up, leaving and even returning. In fact, the gestation of the record culminated in Duguay moving back to his hometown of Peterborough, Ontario in May of 2023.

In some regards, the album continues to mine the sumptuous, expansive rootsiness of Duguay’s earlier albums, yet also gestures toward the more outward experimentation of several of his upcoming projects through its careful, yearning ambiences. The album's underlying creative process started in spring 2020 when Duguay concocted a songwriting exercise to stoke his creativity and occupy his mind under the duress of the pandemic. He set out to compose one piece of music about every house or institution he had ever lived in—anywhere he received mail or slept for more than 90 consecutive nights. Ultimately yielding upwards of fifty individual compositions, Duguay reflected on the resultant body of work and sharpened his focus looking at only the songs pertaining to his upbringing and time in and out of his hometown, which he had left around the time when his personal obstacles had become untenable. Given the subject matter of the collection, it became clear that recording it in Peterborough and enlisting a cast of local musicians that he knew from its community was the best way to present the material.

The nucleus of his new ensemble comprised a rhythm section of collaborators from the Kingston/Wolfe Island area where he was living during the album's initial phases. Duguay had been awarded Kingston, Ontario’s very first artist-in-residence position and used this opportunity to workshop the album’s material. Around them, he gathered a large group of performers that represented the entire spectrum of his Peterborough experience including old high school bandmates, musical heroes from his teenage years, and his best friend from University. He even included his first piano teacher George Bertok (aka Bertokia), as well as a musician that he had met at his very last show before the lockdowns, Erika Nininger, who plays piano and contributes compositions and arrangements to the record. The vocalist Cormac Culkeen, best known for their poignant work as half of Joyful Joyful, played a crucial role on the LP. "Cormac’s voice is a sound that I most closely associate with my adolescence in this community," notes Duguay of his longtime collaborator. In addition to offering their distinctive otherworldly singing on nearly every cut, Culkeen also coordinated the core sessions for the album at All Saints Anglican Church, where they are a member of the ministry team. Despite being primarily a product of lockdown-era necessity, these five days of live sessions with the nine-piece band captured in the church's sanctuary elegantly amplify the spiritual tenor that's long been a key feature of Duguay's music.

The varied background and instrumentation of the musicians involved also propels Duguay's vision—various credits include the likes of Esmerine, Ani Difranco, Utah Phillips, U.S. Girls, Bob Wiseman, Silver Hearts, Ron Sexsmith, John Southworth. Duguay's stated intention was to produce a sort of "experimental heartland totalism" as he calls it; an amalgam of sounds that recontextualizes aspects of Americana amidst more atmospheric and abstract elements.

For all the album's languid twang and rustic contemplation, it's worth noting that an acoustic guitar only appears on the album once for a mere five seconds and almost half of the material is instrumental. The sonic landscape is in fact populated by all manner of sounds—winds, brass, Duguay's own accordion, hurdy-gurdy, contrabass, fiddle, jaw harp and even disorienting flashes of electronic coloration. The robust auditory environment that he creates with these forces, as Duguay reveals, was designed to evoke "the nocturnal sounds of [his] coming of age in Peterborough: bar bands, rural fields, late-night kitchen parties, many voices joined in song” bathed in a sort of psychedelic nostalgia. And true to the record’s title, he succeeds in carving out this distinct and powerful emotional space.

composer, producer
improviser, and accordionist from peterborough, ontario, canada

https://watchthatendsthenight.bandcamp.com/

www.michaelcduguay.com