If anyone thinks Sylvia Tyson at 83 is any less authoritative an artist, hearing “At the End of the Day” will quickly quell that notion.
By Nick Krewen Special to the Star
Her singing voice is a little more weathered, but no less formidable; her lyrics are incisively sharp.
If anyone thinks the legendary Sylvia Tyson at 83 is any less authoritative an artist, hearing her newly released 12-song album At the End of the Day will quickly quell that notion.
“This album may be the best thing I’ve ever done,” she said during a recent Zoom interview from her Rosedale home, and it’s hard to argue with the woman whose career began as part the “first couple of folk” with ex-husband Ian Tyson; who helped launch the careers of Bob Dylan and Gordon Lightfoot, and was influential to so many others; who has been honoured by the Order of Canada, the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame.
Only Tyson could so succinctly pair love and pain with a sense of longing in “Sweet Agony,” the poignant Canadiana waltz that opens the album; or embody the lifelong ache of settling for stability instead of pursuing the one that got away on “I Never Got Over You”; or perfectly summarize a rewarding life on the title track.
The arrangements are full, yet modest; the songs are concise, economical and teeming with life observations that are both romantic and worldly.
“As a songwriter, my feeling is to just present the song,” Tyson said of her approach. “There are certainly some wonderful singers and I appreciate what they do, but there’s a tendency to over-ornament the singing and the melody kind of gets lost in the shuffle.”
It’s a powerful project for which she surrounded herself with veteran colleagues and friends: Danny Greenspoon, Tyson band member and part of the duo’s country-folk experiment Great Speckled Bird in the ’70s, produced the sessions; songwriting collaborators include Prairie Oyster and Tyson keyboardist Joan Besen, Quartette member Cindy Church, the late Shirley Eikhard and local folk and blues stalwart Chris Whiteley.
“I have a lot of faith in Danny,” Tyson said. “He put together an amazing group of musicians and really created an ensemble, which is good, because the songs are quite diverse, but the ensemble kind of holds it all together.”
Tyson prides herself on being a wordsmith.
“I’m very fussy about lyrics,” said the woman who scored a global hit (for We Five) with the very first song she wrote, “You Were on My Mind.”
“And my feeling about lyrics is if they don’t say exactly what you want them to say, you simply haven’t said it right. Sometimes that takes a long time. The English language is very precise.”
How fussy is she?
“I never actually put a song on paper until I know the lyrics are exactly right,” Tyson said. “I tend to write in my head a lot and the reason that it works for me is that if you’re just working inside your head constantly, you tend to get rid of the boring bits and just keep the good stuff, and it makes the lyrics much more incisive.”
Tyson was a little coy about whether the lyrics in such At the End of the Day songs as “Leaves in the Storm” or “Cynical Little Love Song” reflect her own experiences.
“Yes and no,” she said. “I wrote all of the lyrics and the melodies were written by my co-writers. There’s a quote from Huey Lewis where somebody asked him if he wrote from real life, and he said he wrote from real life right up to the point where he didn’t rhyme and then he made the rest up.
“That’s kind of the way I work, too,” she laughed.
The songs that comprise At the End of the Day stem from a 10- to 15-year backlog of material that Tyson hadn’t gotten around to recording.
“I just thought it was time,” she said.
She sent finished lyrics to the friends she decided to co-write with.
Besen collaborated on “Not Quite Rain” and “At the End of the Day” during the pandemic when she “was not only confined to her house, but she also broke her ankle,” Tyson recalled. “So just to sort of keep her going, I sent her a couple of lyrics and … she came up with two great melodies for the songs. I was delighted.”
Tyson had no one else in mind but Whiteley when it came to “Now Tell Me That You’ve Got the Blues.”
“It’s just a fun song. It’s kind of a song that if you went into your local and bellied up to the bar, you might overhear that conversation.”
“Generous Heart” is one of three songs Tyson wrote over the years with Eikhard — best known for the Bonnie Raitt smash “Something to Talk About” — but Eikhard died before she could hear Tyson’s final version.
“I called Shirley to tell her that I was finally going to record this song, which we wrote about 10 or 12 years ago, and she was gone a week later. It was just heartbreaking.”
At the End of the Day might be her final album, Tyson said, but she has touched thousands upon thousands of lives both in her music and behind the scenes since she moved from her birthplace of Chatham, Ont., to Toronto in 1959.
There have been the 13 albums she recorded with Ian Tyson at the forefront of the folk movement; her 14 solo albums and four that she recorded with Quartette, the folk country group she formed 26 years ago.
She’s been a record label owner (Salt Records); a popular radio and TV broadcaster (“Touch The Earth” and “Country in My Soul,” both for CBC), and TV guest (CTV shows “Nashville North” and “The Ian Tyson Show” in the early ’70s).
She has also served on the boards of non-profit music foundation FACTOR and CARAS, the organization behind the Juno Awards; co-edited the 1995 anthology “And Then I Wrote: The Songwriter Speaks” with Tom Russell and wrote a novel, “Joyner’s Dream,” published by HarperCollins in 2011.
But one of Tyson’s more interesting gigs was being a researcher on CBC TV show “Video Hits” (1984 to ’93).
“It certainly gave me a new education in music,” said Tyson. “It took me out of my comfort zone and caused me to listen to a lot of artists I never otherwise would have heard.”
These days, Tyson spends most of her days at home and is a voracious reader.
“I’m an inveterate reader of murder mysteries and I have boxes of them that are going off to someone else that I hope will enjoy them,” she said, adding that she prefers the tactile feel of a book in her hand to an electronic device.
“I have a Kindle and I use it all the time, and I certainly used it on the road, but just having a book in your hands, and the feel of it and the smell of it, is part of it.”
As for going on the road to promote At the End of the Day?
“I don’t have plans as yet,” Tyson said. “I’ve been in conversation with an agent that I’ve worked with before about the possibility of doing some festivals during the summer. At this age, I don’t think I’m up to doing two or three one-hour sets in a club anymore. I’m not that keen to travel, either, although I will if I have to.
“The romance of the road is over for me.”
But Toronto audiences will get to see her at Massey Hall on Nov. 18 as part of the star-studded “The Last Waltz” ensemble, forged to recreate Canadian rock supergroup The Band’s final concert featuring Robbie Robertson.
Tyson will sing late ex-husband Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds,” which Neil Young performed at the original show, and will be part of a cast that includes rock band Mrs. Henry; guitarist Albert Lee; former Rolling Thunder Revue violinist Scarlet Rivera; famed pedal steel guitarist Cindy Cashdollar; one-time Band accompanist Colin Linden; and local singer-songwriters Jerry Leger, Skye Wallace and Devin Cuddy, among others.
Tyson will also be part of a Gordon Lightfoot tribute at Massey Hall that’s being cooked up for sometime in 2024.
Aside from those commitments, Sylvia Tyson’s future is pretty open.
“I’m sure I’ll go on writing,” she said. “Whether I’ll write enough to do an album or even have somebody record the songs, I have no idea. It’s just what I do and it’s never occurred to me to do much of anything else.
“Someone asked Willie Nelson if he ever thought of retiring and he said, ‘All I do is play golf and play music, what do you want me to give up?’
“Except I don’t play golf. That’s how I feel about it.”