The Fugitives are anything but ordinary

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      By calling their latest CD Eccentrically We Love, the Fugitives are telling the world that they’re anything but ordinary—and that’s apt for an act that has sprung out of the slam-poetry scene to become one of this city’s top folk attractions. But when the Georgia Straight reaches Fugitives singer-guitarist Brendan McLeod on his cellphone, he’s on the brink of making a professional breakthrough of a different kind, this time because he’s also oddly normal.

      First, however, he’s got to make a small investment in his future.

      He’s hoofing it to Value Village, where he plans to buy a used-but-not-abused polo shirt—an item of apparel, he notes, that he’s never owned. It seems he’s been asked to wear one to an audition for a TV commercial, thanks to a local casting director who ran across McLeod’s smiling mug on the Turner Music talent agency’s Web site.

      “Apparently, I have a very, very generic face,” he explains, somewhat ruefully. “She said, ”˜You could be anyone! You could be a pizza-delivery guy, you could be a union worker, you could be a father. So don’t change anything. Just look exactly the way you do.’ ”

      The promise—or threat—of an acting career doesn’t faze McLeod. He’s comfortable enough on-stage that he’s won several slam-poetry contests, including the 2004 Canadian Spoken Wordlympics. As far as being in the public eye goes, he once staged a performance-art event on the Vancouver Art Gallery grounds in which he let strangers tackle him for a dollar. But he’s primarily a writer, and a good enough one that he won the 2006 International 3-Day Novel Contest with his book The Convictions of Leonard McKinley. Barbara Adler, who sings and plays accordion in the Fugitives, is also a published poet and author of short stories.

      But while there’s a long history of poets becoming musicians—with Patti Smith and the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle being just two of many—McLeod and Adler have had the good sense to join forces with songwriter Adrian Glynn and multi-instrumentalist Steven Charles. In the process, they’ve invented a kind of 21st-century hootenanny sound that’s refreshingly free of the usual beatnik and hip-hop clichés.

      “At first, it was just kind of a pragmatic thing,” McLeod admits. “The first thing we were asked to do—Barbara and myself and C.R. Avery, ’cause he was in the first version of the Fugitives, too—was to go to Europe to do a poetry festival. But we didn’t want to go all the way over there for one gig, and we thought it would be weird to tour around as a group of poets. So I played guitar and Barbara played a bit of piano and C.R., of course, is a musician, so we were like ”˜Well, why don’t we just form a band?’”

      The three added singer-songwriter Mark Berube, and the Fugitives were born—although that lineup proved only a temporary expedient. The chronically restless Avery soon left, followed by Berube; both have had some success as solo artists. One of the unexpected consequences of their departure, however, is that the “new” Fugitives sound a lot more like a group and a lot less like a revue. There’s a unity of purpose to Eccentrically We Love that was missing on earlier releases—and not just because, as McLeod notes, he and Adler have “learned to sing”.

      The band’s first efforts were self-consciously hybrid affairs, but that’s no longer the case. “It was like ”˜We’re going to do spoken word and music, and we’re going to try to combine them,’” McLeod explains. “So someone would bring a song to the floor—a melody or a chorus—and then Barbara, say, would put a spoken-word section into it. But it’s totally changed now. The new album has conspicuously less spoken word in it, and that wasn’t a conscious choice. It was just like we were doing these songs, and it just didn’t seem to mesh as well.”

      The energetic, upbeat songs that dominate the new CD tend to set harmonized vocals against a web of stringed instruments, including guitar, Dobro, balalaika, and banjo. They’re also animated by a rare sense of optimism. “Breaking Promises” is actually about keeping them; the sing-along choruses of “All the Trouble” are sure proof against misery; and even McLeod’s graveside meditation, “Funeral”, is more like a celebration of life than a eulogy. Eccentrically We Love contains a song called “City of Rain”, but the underlying message is that even in No Fun City the sun’s eventually going to shine.

      “We’re all pretty positive,” McLeod explains. “And, I mean, look at where we live!”

      Coming from someone walking down East Hastings Street on his way to buy a secondhand shirt, this could sound ironic, but it’s not.

      “We have tons of reasons to be positive and earnest and happy about our place in the world,” says McLeod. “So if we were to go on-stage and be cynical, it would be a lie.”

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