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NO DEPRESSION
July 25, 2024
Jim Cuddy — All the World Fades Away
Peter Blackstock
As co-leader of Canadian band Blue Rodeo, Cuddy has released 16 studio albums since the late 1980s. But sometimes the songs he writes end up feeling better-suited to solo projects, and so in 1998 he began releasing occasional records under his own name as well. All the World Fades Away is his sixth solo album, and I’d say it’s his best, simply because the songs are so strong across the board. If you’ve liked Blue Rodeo’s records across the decades, you’ll almost certainly hear similar qualities here; indeed, the players include a couple of Blue Rodeo members (bassist Bazil Donovan and guitarist Colin Cripps), while Cuddy’s BR co-leader Greg Keelor adds vocals on the track “Everyday Angels.”
The first song written for the record, “Good News,” is one of the album’s best tracks; written during the early days of the pandemic, its chorus seeks hope in dark times with the assurance that “I know we’ll get through it, we just gotta hear some good news.” But it rings true amid tumultuous sociopolitical times that continue. While Cuddy acknowledges that “there’s damage that surely will last,” he continues by singing that “I hope we have learned not to slip back to ways of the past.” Musically, Cuddy puts his best moment right up front: “Learn to Live Alone” isn’t so much about a breakup as about a long separation, and it rings true with chiming guitars and the kind of exquisite, easily singable melody that has always made Cuddy one of the finest roots-rockers of our time.
NEXT
2024-06-14
JIM CUDDY
ALL THE WORLD FADES AWAY
Genre: Roots
Sound: Beautifully sung, sometimes heart wrenching ballads and uplifting songs of celebration
If you like: Blue Rodeo, Jackson Browne, Gordon Lightfoot
Rating: NNNNN (out of 5)
Why you should listen: Not only is Jim Cuddy a gifted singer, but as a songwriter, he has an amazing skill at capturing feelings of a moment in time, either by fondly looking back or directly dropping listeners into the experience. A talented storyteller with many touching tales to share. His best solo work yet.
Exclaim!
2019-05-30
Recorded live on the top floor of Cuddy’s barn, Countrywide Soul is intended to be as “natural as possible” to keep the “woody sound of the barn board room.” It consists of 12 songs, including two new ones, a few covers and some re-worked material from his solo albums as well as from Blue Rodeo.
“When I was choosing songs for the record I tried to find those in which I could change the mood and tone or songs that I felt had been underdeveloped on previous records,” Cuddy said in the release.
“All In Time,” a remake of his 1998 solo album’s title track, opens Countrywide Soul and as Cuddy says, the “mood and tone” are changed from his original tune. It’s has a slowed-down tempo, with Cuddy heard listing chords before getting the band ready to play the love-based tune. Opening softly and slowly like a sunrise, there’s constant drum beating throughout, with strings, guitars, a mandolin, a Wurlitzer and an accordion type sound all heard on the track.
Two new songs on the album include “Back Here Again,” and “Glorious Day”; the former is a classic toe-tapping country song, pining for a lover, with drums, the violin and other string instruments including a banjo playing on the track. The latter is a positive mid-tempo song, with Cuddy sounding like the “cool guy” in the storyline. Strings are a big part and even include a solo, while drums pound, electric guitars electrify and the bass gives the song some extra edge.
“Clearer View,” a song from Blue Rodeo’s 2002 full-length Palace of Gold, is one Cuddy said felt “underdeveloped” when previously recorded, is still upbeat, but also includes keys, guitars and drums, while “Wash Me Down,” a Cuddy solo tune from 2011’s Skyscraper Soul, focused on remembering someone when they leave, closes out the album, with strings being the main focus of the slowed-down beat and his band singing along with him. This song works as the last one on the album since it’s like saying “goodbye” to Cuddy and his band until next time.
Cuddy also puts a cover spin on two classic songs, one being “Almost Persuaded,” originally recorded by George Jones, and the second is Glen Campbell’s ‘Rhinestone Cowboy.” Both covers help shape the overall album, and help Cuddy show the variety of tunes he can interpret via his own vision.
With the creativity to recreate all these songs, Cuddy showcasing his vocal abilities and his band coming together to record in a different kind of space, Countrywide Soul is a unique blend of making what is old new again. (Warner)–
Hello!
2018-01
PICK OF THE WEEK
Like Blue Rodeo’s albums, Jim Cuddy’s solo records blend countrytinged rock with pop ballads. The only real difference is that, without Greg Keelor, his co-frontman in Blue Rodeo, Jim’s recordings are generally more upbeat. That said, some of the best songs on Constellation are those steeped in melancholy. The title track is a piano ballad about a dying friend. Jim, 62, sings about struggling to say goodbye as the song builds to a stirring crescendo. “You Be the Leaver” is another meditation on separation and includes the memorable line “So you be the leaver, I’ll be the left behind.” But there are plenty of brighter moments. The joyous, organ-fuelled “While I Was Waiting” revels in finding romance, while “Roses at Your Feet” is a gentle song of devotion, directed at his wife of more than 30 years, actress Rena Polley. Striking a balance between love and loss, Jim – who’s set to tour Canada as of Feb. 8 –has created an album that’s rich in personal truths.
– Nicholas Jennings
Exclaim!
2018-01-19
Jim Cuddy, co-frontman for Canada’s venerable Blue Rodeo, has rarely sounded better. At 62, his voice remains as uncannily clear, affecting and inviting as it was back in his band’s 1990s heyday. But age has deepened the tones a touch or two, and warmed up the edges; it’s a remarkable, enviable gift, and no small part of what has kept Cuddy in the game for so long. Even on otherwise average material, his vocal work is often astonishingly beautiful.
Not much on Constellation, Cuddy’s fourth solo outing (and first since 2011’s terrific Skyscraper Soul), will surprise longtime fans. Cuddy has long since perfected the art of the country-pop song, and Constellation is a typically reliable collection. But this is a bit of faint praise, since the consistency that has kept Cuddy from too many misfires over 30 years of songwriting is also what makes him somewhat predictable. He has crafted a unique and eminently recognizable voice in a business where that’s exceedingly difficult, but this signature sound has become a bit of a creative trap.
Still, what he offers on Constellation is better than most of what we get from a generation of Cuddy’s admirers and acolytes, and for this we are thankful. On the mandolin-driven stomp of “Where You Gonna Run,” we catch a glimpse of a back porch jam that’s as irresistible as it is fleeting, while on album standout “Hands On the Glass,” with its driving shuffle and menacing guitars, Cuddy reminds us of what he can do when he and his crack band stretch into more expansive sonic territory. Even if much of the album feels a bit familiar, it’s hard to complain much when it all sounds so sweet.
Montreal Gazette
2011-09-27
Jim Cuddy isn’t a natural born bluesman, but it sure is fun to hear him play the part in “Water’s Running High”. The Orleans-flavoured sizzler will be a shock for those who associate the gentler half of Blue Rodeo’s front line primarily with bittersweet ballads, and there’s no question Skyscraper Soul is the most adventurous of Cuddy’s three solo releases. For one thing, the title track – the disc’s most poignant song – is an ode to the city, not to a lover. For another, the previous albums’ searing violin is muted in favour of vibrant organ and trumpet. And while a less subtle songwriter would have turned “Everyone Watched the Wedding” into a pile of royalist goo, Cuddy uses Will and Kate as a novel framing device for the everyday struggles he documents so well.
– Jordan Zivitz
Ottawa Citizen
2011-09-27
OTTAWA — The first thing fans will notice about Jim Cuddy’s third solo album, Skyscraper Soul, to be released Tuesday, Sept. 27, is that it’s a lot less country than his past endeavours. Instead of fiddle and pedal steel, the sounds of trumpet and piano decorate the musical landscape.
The songs are still breezy and melodic, and the singing represents some of Cuddy’s sweetest, so it’s not a huge departure for the singer-songwriter best known as the frontman of Canada’s beloved roots rockers Blue Rodeo. Thematically, however, it did not go in the direction he had planned.
Blue Rodeo had just finished a tour and Cuddy was back home in Toronto, determined to write some songs featuring the talents of violinist Anne Lindsay, a longtime friend and key member of the Cuddy band.
“I just couldn’t do it this time,” says Cuddy. “It wasn’t where my interest lay and it didn’t work with the themes of the record. Every time I would write a song that I thought would be suitable for the fiddle, I couldn’t make it rural. I kept making it more city-sounding, more a brick neighbourhood than a field.”
One of the first songs written was the title track Skyscraper Soul, a love letter of sorts to Cuddy’s home city Toronto, where he and his wife Rena Polley have raised three children, now in their late teens and 20s.
“There are all these urban centres around the world that I’ve got so much inspiration from, and then I come back and write about the mountains and Lake Louise. OK, that was inspiring at one time too, but I’ve had as much inspiration from New York and Toronto as anywhere,” he says.
Another source of inspiration was this year’s Royal wedding. Upon hearing reports that two billion people were planning to watch the union of Will and Kate on television, Cuddy was fascinated. It led him to write a song called Everybody Watched the Wedding, taking the perspective of an ordinary person with a less-than-perfect life.
“Something about watching this event made him feel good about life, that a beautiful fairy tale would manifest in front of him,” Cuddy says, adding that he had also seen The King’s Speech around the same time he wrote the song.
“I was really taken with this notion that, in order to be inspiring, the royals couldn’t have any characteristics of normal people,” he says. “Somehow this kid, Will, has accepted the fact that he needs to serve some function for his nation, and he has to understand how to adopt that character. I thought that was very noble. So then really, the contemplation was about ‘what is the wedding doing for people?’ ”
As the new songs fell into place, Cuddy decided to include a loose jam he had written earlier for a short movie written by and featuring his actress wife. The film is a 22-minute black comedy called The Four Sisters, based on four sisters who lose their mother. The song is a bluesy torrent of wailing organ, vocals and trumpet, a wild child compared to the crisp, melodic nuggets that make up the rest of the album.
“If you saw the film, it would make sense,” says Cuddy with a laugh, noting that he loved the way they set the band up in the studio to record it. “The song is almost a complete anomaly on the record. But I was so happy with the recording that I said, ‘OK, this is going to be the template for making my own record.’ It was more a recording template than a writing template.”
Five years have gone by since Cuddy’s last solo album, The Light That Guides You Home, and the singer-songwriter would find it a challenge to record any more frequently because he works around Blue Rodeo’s schedule. Lately, though, he’s been wondering if there’s an expiry date on a music career.
“I’m 55, I don’t know how much more time I have,” he muses. “I used to think that 60 was the end, but now maybe it could be 65. McCartney was 68 on his last tour, and he was magnificent, but I’m not McCartney. Maybe 65, but that’s like two more records. I don’t know if that’s enough.”
In the meantime, he plans to keep busy. “Certainly, there is going to be a diminishing return on physical assets,” he says. “I think that’s one of the reasons I work hard now. I can still sing and I don’t feel much deterioration from being older so I want to get it down while I can.”
The Sun Newspapers
2007-11-22
JIM CUDDY
The Light That Guides You Home
****
If Blue Rodeo were The Beatles, Jim Cuddy, we humbly submit, would be Paul — the slightly poppier and more accessible yin to the Lennonesque Greg Keelor’s darker and more enigmatic yang. Hold your angry e-mails, that is not a dig at Cuddy. After all, Lennon made some groundbreaking solo LPs — but whose stuff do you hear more often?
The same could be said of the Rodeo leaders’ solo work. Sure, Keelor has made some daring and unconventional choices with his psychedelic experiments but we suspect Cuddy’s second solo album will end up in heavier rotation on most fans’ iPods. Mainly because The Light That Guides You Home — his first extra-curricular full-length since 1999’s All in Time — delivers everything you know, love, want and expect from Cuddy: Impeccably crafted, slightly nostalgic country-rock and roots-pop laced with gorgeous melodies, bittersweet lyrics, heartfelt vocals and twangy sincerity. There are cuts that gently rock like Neil Young in Laurel Canyon circa ’69.
There’s some strummy folk with Dylanesque harmonicas and fingerpicked acoustic guitars.There’s heartsqueezing piano balladry flecked with strings and a lonely, lyrical trumpet. There are jangly, Byrdsian guitars. There are fiddles that lend a Mellencampy air to the proceedings. And there’s even a rollicking honkytonk number that boasts a boisterous barrelhouse piano and the album’s funniest line: “16 bottles and a wedding trunk / Oughta be a law against marrying drunk.” Yeah, it’s a silly love song. But what’s wrong with that? It’s still a charmer. Just like the rest of this disc.
Assorted Highlights
2007-11-22
HIGHLIGHTS
The Light That Guides You Home
The Light That Guides You Home — his first extra-curricular full-length since 1999’s All in Time — delivers everything you know, love, want and expect from Cuddy: Impeccably crafted, slightly nostalgic country-rock and roots-pop laced with gorgeous melodies, bittersweet lyrics, heartfelt vocals and twangy sincerity. There are cuts that gently rock like Neil Young in Laurel Canyon circa ’69. There’s some strummy folk with Dylanesque harmonicas and fingerpicked acoustic guitars. There’s heartsqueezing piano balladry flecked with strings and a lonely, lyrical trumpet. There are jangly, Byrdsian guitars. There are fiddles that lend a Mellencampy air to the proceedings. And there’s even a rollicking honkytonk number that boasts a boisterous barrelhouse piano and the album’s funniest line: “16 bottles and a wedding trunk / Oughta be a law against marrying drunk.” Yeah, it’s a
silly love song. But what’s wrong with that? It’s still a charmer. Just like the rest of this disc.
****
– The Sun Newspaper Group
Fat, driving country-rock rhythms, gorgeous ringing guitars, soaring piano and organ chords, and one of the truest and most expressive voices in contemporary music are the core matter of Blue Rodeo frontman Jim Cuddy’s second solo album, a set of 12 mostly confessional, sentimental and articulate songs about love in various stages of engagement, fulfillment and disintegration. Meticulously and lusciously produced by Cuddy and Colin Cripps, the album is a generous, big-budget item that boasts loads of musical muscle – but never loses sight of the power of songs that come from the heart.
****(out of 4)
– The Toronto Star
…the band flex a lot of muscle. This pushes Cuddy’s ageless voice to unexpected heights, and his exuberance at fronting a different cast of characters is palpable….
The fact is, the man is one of this country’s great songwrites, and this album is a timely
reminder to not take him for granted.
– EXCLAIM
All In Time
As strong a catalog as Blue Rodeo has compiled over the past decade, Jim Cuddy’s solo debut actually ups the ante.
– No Depression
Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy slips into solo waters for a little soul-cleansing with All In Time. There’s no gurus on Cuddy’s CD, just a lingering melancholy whose heartache becomes a thing of musical beauty thanks to his haunting melodies, lyrical honesty and a voice that’s become a Canadian classic when it comes to combining the gentler qualities of country and rock.
– Calgary Herald
“Cuddy and company dished out one of those exceptional sets that feed off the crowd and build from the original tunes…. The beauty of Cuddy’s All In Time material is that it builds on a familiar sound and takes his extraordinary vocal skills to a new area.”
– The Ottawa Sun
Times & Transcript (Moncton)
2007-07-27
Page: B5, Section: Life
Byline: Eric Lewis Music Reviews
Jim Cuddy
The Light That Guides You Home (Warner Music)
****
What do you get when you take one-half of the primary songwriters in Blue Rodeo and have him release a solo album? If you guessed an album that sounds exactly like his Blue Rodeo output, you guessed right. Jim Cuddy doesn’t break any new ground on this album, his second solo effort, but he doesn’t need to. He is simply a great songwriter who tells stories of life and love in a way that comes across like it is effortless to him. He is the poppier, perhaps more accessible side to Blue Rodeo, where Greg Keelor has a bluesier, rougher style of song.
Cuddy is in fine form here. This is an album full of good folk-rock tunes occasionally bordering on country. They’re catchy, melodic, and familiar sounding, but in the best way possible.
Kathleen Edwards’ unmistakable voice appears on “Married” where she and Cuddy do their own June and Johnny Cash-ish duet. It’s a really fun song, and their voices complement each other. Kathleen has been touring with Blue Rodeo and her husband Colin Cripps produced this album, so there are a few connections there.
The title track, “Maybe Sometime,” “Married,” “Countrywide Soul” the upbeat “Fine Day” and the sweet piano ballad “Pull Me Through,” are all good tunes, but there isn’t a bad moment here.
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Belle Starr 
Blue Rodeo 
Jim Cuddy 
Elliott BROOD 
Greg Keelor 
The Sadies 
Skydiggers 
Suzie Ungerleider 
Belle Starr 
Blue Rodeo 
Jim Cuddy 
Elliott BROOD 
Greg Keelor 
The Sadies 
Skydiggers 
Suzie Ungerleider 
