Calgary Herald Interview October 2008

About a boy
How Calgary transgendered roots musician Rae Spoon gave up his past life to forge his own identity
Eric Volmers, Calgary Herald
Published: Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Spotlight

Rae Spoon’s new CD superioryouareinferior is in stores today. Release party is Wednesday at the Marquee Room.

It was during a Christmas show in a small German town near Leipzig last year that an unexpected ghost from Rae Spoon’s past surfaced with the exuberance of a revival-tent preacher.

The 27-year-old singer was performing in an abandoned building in the former East Germany, where a group of squatters had set up a makeshift cultural centre for the evening. There was the usual sampling of Europe’s healthy left wing in the house: vegans, anti-fascists, gays, lesbians and the transgendered.

Not exactly the sort of place one would expect to hear a spirited run through the American gospel tune, I’m Working on a Building, a thumping ode to unwavering Christian faith in which the narrator promises to “quit my sinning” and “start my praying.”

But for Spoon, a transgendered folk singer, unearthing the old gospel chestnut offered a glimpse into another life; one long before his first transformation would send him from the grip of a large Pentecostal church in suburban Calgary to a new life, identity, and gender in Vancouver.

“I know a bunch of old gospel tunes,” Spoon says. “I always explain to (the audience) first. I don’t want them to think I’m trying to convert them. But I grew up on it so I think it makes sense. And I think it was a bit of a novelty to them.”

Perhaps it was. But there may have been other reasons to unleash this hand-clapping tune to a group of well-meaning, if perhaps not entirely flexible, left-wing politicos.

If nothing else, it was bold.

“Rae likes to f— with people,” says friend Lorrie Matheson, who produced Spoon’s brilliant new disc superior-youareinferior at his Calgary studio.

“It’s like, ‘Here’s a bunch of German, quasi-intellectuals . . . let’s run through some old church songs to f— with them.’ “

Identifying himself as a male for nearly a decade, Spoon’s career and life seem largely defined by bold transformations: from devout Christian to lesbian; female to male; choir girl to uncompromising folk singer.

And now, with his fourth album, Spoon seems in a transformative mood again. Gone is the twang in his voice. Gone is his trademark bedrock of folk and country. Spoon describes superioryouareinferior as “Canadian gothic” and it’s filled with drum loops, ghostly sounds and orchestration. Written during dark, solitary nights on the road, the album reveals a remarkably mature songwriter with an often stunningly beautiful voice. The vocals are alternately fragile and soaring; both vulnerable and powerful. They also sound undeniably feminine.

“I don’t see my voice as female and I don’t see myself as female,” Spoon explains. “I don’t really see people as having male or female voices, I’m not one of those people. The reason it sounds the way it does is that I have the confidence to sound how I actually sound. If people think it sounds like a woman, if people think I’m a woman, there’s nothing I can do about that.”

During an interview with the Herald on a sunny afternoon in Kensington, Spoon seems to be disappearing into the background of a busy neighbourhood coffee shop.

Sitting against the wall behind a giant cup of tea, he looks small and androgynous. He speaks so quietly at times that it’s hard to hear him.

It’s not exactly the sort of persona one expects from the singer. A self-described “religion abstainer,” Spoon broke from his church when he was 16. He came out not long afterwards. By 2000, he had a girlfriend, was living in Vancouver and had begun to identify himself as a male. To this day, he often tours the wild Canadian bar circuit by Greyhound bus, playing the sort of rural establishments not known for attracting gay-friendly patrons. On stage, Spoon has a reputation as a spirited performer, infusing folkie songs with a punk-rock esthetic.

“Rae is pretty courageous, but also pretty matter-of-fact about stuff,” says Geoff Berner, a Vancouver-based singer-songwriter who has toured Canada with Spoon via Greyhound three or four times. “There’s this kind of Albertan thing — a no-nonsense approach. We’d go play small-town B.C., small-town Alberta, small-town Manitoba and we never had a problem and Rae just did his thing. If people reacted at all it was with an astonished respect that he was going out and playing these places. You could never argue with how good he was. I think he probably affected how people thought about trans issues in the places he was going.”

But superioryouareinferior is no manifesto. There are no overtly political songs to address trans or gay issues. What makes it such a ground-breaking album for Spoon is its honesty, vulnerability; it’s darkness and devotion to songcraft. There is a recurring theme of isolation, perhaps an allusion to Spoon’s square-peg past growing up as a member of a religious family and a large pentecostal church in Calgary’s northwest.

Religious roots run deep in Spoon’s family tree. Born the eldest of four siblings, his family faithfully attended services on Sunday and during the week. Years earlier, his grandmother played steel guitar and accordion in a church. His grandfather was a preacher.

At home, anything that smacked even slightly of the occult — even the Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks — was banned from the household. Young Rae wore long hair and long dresses, sang in the church choir and eventually began writing shaky tunes about Jesus on his acoustic guitar.

“I started writing Christian music when I was 13 or so,” he says. “When you’re 13 you don’t really have a lot to write about. If you have religion, that’s a topic. I think I was fairly religious. I couldn’t see the world without it and that’s how we were raised.”

Spoon sat through sermons that denounced homosexuality. At times, members of the faith who had been “cured” of their gayness were trotted out as success stories. Spoon says he doesn’t remember a specific moment when he lost his religion. It was more of a gradual drift. One day he was writing songs about Jesus, the next he was getting in trouble for drowning out sermons with his walkman, hiding the headphones and wires behind long hair and and long dresses while listening to Nirvana.

“I think I was gradually escaping,” he said. “At 14, it was very strange, there wasn’t a clear path out. I was just finding all these little influences.”

But while Spoon seems reluctant to say anything bad about Calgary, it’s clear his return to town this summer was not exactly a triumphant homecoming. Spoon recorded the disc with Matheson in 2007. But his return this summer was purely for practical reasons. He needed to find a job and figured Calgary’s booming economy was the place to do it. He eventually found work at Chicken on the Way, Kensington’s long-standing fast-food joint known for its giant chicken out front. Working behind the late-night chicken counter may not be the best way to meet Calgary’s artistic elite, but Spoon’s somewhat prickly relationship with the city started long before he was serving fried chicken to the after-bar crowd.

On the song My Heart is a Piece of Garbage, Fight Seagulls! Fight!, he sings “the Calgary tower stands up in the sky like a giant fist.” Spoon was in his early-20s when he left Cowtown, packing up his banjo and guitar and leaving behind the tower, the city, his family and his faith. Needless to say, he doesn’t seem to harbour much nostalgia for his hometown.

“I would say it was a bit of an escape,” says his younger sister, Nick Wilson, who still lives in town. “Calgary is not an easy place if you are gay or trans, or have any social justice values. It’s not that easy to live here.”

Wilson, who remains close with her brother, said Spoon found an accepting community in Vancouver fairly quickly. But cutting ties with parts of his past, particularly the church, was necessary.

“It’s not only about being queer or transgendered,” Wilson says. “Any sort of critical thinking just wasn’t accepted. I definitely saw the struggle. I’m queer as well and I went through a similar struggle. We left the church very early — 15 or 16. But it’s still something that is built into you.”

Spoon has lived in various places since leaving Calgary, including stints in Germany.

But superioryouareinferior is very much a product of the road; it’s about being transient and searching for a home and for belonging.

“It’s not so much about being transgendered as it is about being the ‘other’ in certain places,” Spoon says. “It’s a lot darker, there are ghost references. I wrote it on the highway, in the Greyhound. It was a matter of putting myself in the picture of Canada. I think that’s where the idea of identity came in. It’s about me in the small towns, or people like me.”

Spoon now lives in Montreal with his long-time girlfriend. And despite its themes of solitude and isolation, there are also hints on the album that a certain peace has settled over him. On the impossibly gorgeous I’ll Be A Ghost For You — a fragile hymn to devotion and unconditional love — he sings: “If you feel me in your bones. I have found a home. Permanent like a tattoo.”

“I think I’m in a place where I don’t feel the need to have everybody see me as only one thing,” he says.

“I think I realized I’m happier with who I am.”

evolmers@theherald.canwest.com