Sincerely yours

Members of Bedouin Soundclash, from left: drummer Pat Pengelly, bassist Eon Sinclair and vocalist/guitarist Jay Malinowski. (Universal Music Canada)

Sometimes a hit song can really mess up a band.

Sure, it’s great to hear your song pouring out of the speakers in mall food courts or car stereos. It’s even better when you hear a crowd of thousands of people singing along. But it also creates many pressures and expectations that can make musicians feel like they’re putting too much emphasis on the wrong half of the phrase “music business.”

For the Kingston trio Bedouin Soundclash, the success of When the Night Feels My Song has been a glorious though somewhat mixed blessing. A lilting, joyful reggae-pop number that was born for singalongs, it’s been one of the most played songs on Canadian radio in the last three years. After it was featured in a commercial for T-Mobile phones in the U.K., it went on to crack the Top 30 there. The song’s ubiquity also led to sell-out national tours, the re-release of the band’s 2004 indie album Sounding a Mosaic in Canada, a Stateside deal with the label Side One Dummy and the 2006 Juno Award for Best New Group.

Obviously, Bedouin Soundclash’s breakthrough hit created a bounty of opportunities — maybe too many.

“We had three years of catch-up,” singer-guitarist Jay Malinowski says over the phone from his home in Toronto. “We’d go somewhere to play and then we’d hear about another country where we could tour. Then there’d be a mad dash to that place to do a show and then move on to the next place. You can feel like you don’t know if the end is in sight or what the end looks like. We’d never gone through anything like what happened with that record.”

Recorded after a well-deserved period of rest, the band’s recently released third album, Street Gospels, strongly suggests that the hectic experience served them well — it’s a nuanced and surprisingly gentle collection of songs that make good on the promise the group displayed on earlier discs. Though they sound confident and re-energized on songs such as the jangly St. Andrews and the more delicate 12:59 Lullaby, Malinowski admits that getting a close look at the machinery of the music industry had him wondering what the point of playing was and whether it was “just about selling shoes to kids.” Adds the singer, “That’s sort of how you feel at points.”

That their hit song became so beloved was nevertheless inspiring and exciting. Malinowski was particularly struck by “the amount of emails or messages we would get from people who heard When the Night Feels My Song and said that it helped them through someone passing away in their life.” Lots of parents told him how much their babies liked it, too. “When you hear things like that, you think, ‘This is something bigger than me,’” he says.

(Universal Music Canada)

It was a dramatic change of tempo for a group of friends who had formed in 2000, having bonded over a mutual love of punk and reggae records while students at Queen’s University. The music they played — an easy-going, melodic blend of rock and folk with a heavy emphasis on Jamaican influences — was not the kind of thing that earned them the critical support or industry interest lavished upon so many other Canadian acts this decade.

“We’d have bands opening before us that the reps from major record labels would come to see and they would leave during our set because we seemed like such a hopeless proposition to them,” Malinowski says. “When our record came out, everyone said this is never getting on the radio. Critics said, ‘Why are Canadian kids making this music?’ This has absolutely no place in our country — that was more or less the critical response we got, and still get.”

That’s an unfortunate situation, partially because Canadian kids like Bedouin Soundclash have every reason to be making this music. Though the history has only recently become better known, there’s long been a strong West Indian influence on Canadian music, fostered in large part by the recordings of Jamaicans living here. This cultural exchange was exposed on the Lights in the Attic label’s Jamaica to Toronto compilation — its success spawned a follow-up anthology devoted to Summer Records, which sprang out of a recording studio in Malton, Ont., in the 1970s.

Fitting into that tradition of Jamaican-Canadian exchange, Bedouin Soundclash display a respectful take on their reggae, dub and ska influences on Street Gospels. Indeed, Malinowski worries that this music still doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

“There’s a cultural degradation of the history of Jamaican music that we don’t do with the blues or jazz,” he says. “Because reggae came from a Third World country, I feel that people associate it with Third World vacations. They associate it with going on a cruise ship or smoking weed or having a barbecue in their backyard. People don’t do that with jazz music or the blues. If there’s a blues fusion band, you wouldn’t start calling them stoners or any of these things that are attached to the music. People don’t realize how belittling that is.”

He feels something similar whenever he hears someone say that his band makes great summer music. “That’s nice if that’s how you listen to it,” he says, “but to us, we’re not making summer music. I understand that’s how people get a lot of these connotations, but it would be like saying everything that was forever recorded by Motown, you smoke weed to it or get drunk to it or only listen to it when it’s sunny. This is soul music from another country and it has a very rich history.”

That reverent attitude is plenty evident in Street Gospels. Equally evident is the quality that might irk those jaded music-biz types most about Bedouin Soundclash: the band’s sincerity. As Malinowski quips, that’s “the antithesis of cool — if Bob Dylan was sincere, he’d be one of the most uncool musicians ever.”

He rightly questions the value of subversion for its own sake. Bedouin Soundclash are more about spirituality, truthfulness and the possibility of human connection, the qualities that turned the musicians on to Joe Strummer, Sam Cooke, the Upsetters and plenty of other musicians they love.

You can hear those same qualities in When the Night Feels My Song, which is why it’s connected with audiences in a way that few songs do. “I really think that what makes music important is how it affects people around you in a real way,” Malinowski says, “and a way that will last.”

Jason Anderson is a Toronto-based writer.

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