All wild things are shy
I have told you this story before, and for reasons that will be made clear it’s important that I tell it again. It opens years ago, in St Johns, Newfoundland on a Sunday morning with a half-blue sky, crisp and just cold enough to feel barely warm enough for a light jacket. Friends had started a new music festival called Lawnya Vawnya, and of the many ingenious twists on the multi-day festival format they introduced was a music crawl through the city. A music crawl that found artists inside local businesses to play paired down sets in thrift stores, cafes and yoga studios, and it’s here that I first heard Richard Laviolette; on the upper floor of a yoga studio, playing with such passion and heart and love that it turned a yoga studio into a house of worship for the minutes we congregated within its walls. I still remember the song that played as I found my place to stand, Richard singing in chorus with everyone who knew the words
When I decide to die or whatever.
Everyone told me the same thing. “You gotta hear Ricky’s records”, and they were right.
In the fall of 2013, I paired with my dear friend Steven Lambke, a beautiful musician who also runs the venerated long running indie label You’ve Changed Records, to put a project together in the Yukon where a different version of me used to live. I had my own label at the time, Headless Owl Records, and we put together a project that ultimately became known as Community Theatre. The concept was simple: get all our friends together and bring them all up to the Yukon to record an album together, a compilation of dear friends, and wrap it all up with concerts at the Yukon Arts Centre in Whitehorse and the Klondike Institute of Arts and Culture in Dawson City.
We asked everyone to write a song before arriving, so that we could record with efficiency given the limited timeframe of a single week, and while we expected that each song would be a solitary action, what happened instead was something beautiful, and again it was because of Richard. I remember walking into the studio, a truck full of stragglers arriving on the final flight, Richard was playing the song he had brought, “Snailhouse”, and immediately it became something more than a song he was working on. Excited hands grabbed guitars, bass and drums. It became a kind of Crazy Horse tinged affair, fuzzy with a bite and grit in the teeth. Everyone wanted to be a part of it, and suddenly a series of solo songs became a collaborative affair. We thought we were going to build a compilation, what we ended up with was community.
When we were done recording, we celebrated with a night in the water of the Takhini Hot Springs (if you ever visit Whitehorse in the winter do yourself a favor and go when it’s colder than you imagined humanly possible outside). All of us soaked in the water, under the bitter darkness of the night sky, all of us save Richard, whose health condition made it so he wasn’t able to be in the water. He stood at the side of the pool, smiled and joked and shared stories and found the same stars in the sky.
Richard wrote songs that built pictures of a life, chords that make the dirt under his feet so alive you might feel what he feels, a voice like a blade that makes incisions in the sky to show the stars hidden there. Richard wrote songs that felt like home, any home at all, even the homes you have yet to know. Songs that sing of promise, tenderness, grief and longing. The first song I ever heard him sing was “Funeral Song” that day in St Johns, and when I think about Ricky I hear those words he sang in that Yoga studio like a church down by the water in Newfoundland.
When I decide to die or whatever.
Richard’s mother passed away from Huntington's Disease in 2016, and over the next five years he wrote and recorded what would become his final album, All Wild Things are Shy, before his own passing last year, in September.
It’s hard to listen to someone’s last words. Richard and I were never close, but we were always friendly and whenever we saw each other we would smile and chat and when he smiled it made you feel like nothing could hurt you. This was Richard’s strength, maybe you could feel safe and cared for even while knowing and feeling all the hard corners of this life. Maybe there’s more to all of this, and maybe sometimes all you need is to smile at a friend and make time to check in.
When Steve Lambke sent me Richard’s final record, he told me to take my time getting to it. Make sure you’re ready. Love you friend. More than anything, I wish I could tell my younger self that when you get older, you will tell your friends you love them whenever you can, because some day they’ll be gone and you’ll regret all the times you held back. It took me a while to be ready, and when I was it still made me cry at every turn.
"Milkweed and Motherwort" opens the record with conviction, guitars that ring like a downed telephone wire, sparks on the highway. Richards voice climbing out onto the vista, lately it seems I’m tired and I don’t know why, and you can hear the weariness in his throat matched only by the boundless enthusiasm of the guitar in his hand. The Neil and Crazy Horse of it all drawing lines back to that makeshift studio in Whitehorse when "Snailhouse" became this great and bombastic song built around clanging guitars
On the title track, "All Wild Things Are Shy", Constantines singer Bry Webb and Steph Yates of Cots sharing the burden of beautiful and tender words delivered over a guitar gently picked and a piano knowing exactly when and where it is needed. A reference lingers in a verse to "O Grace", the lead track of Josephine by Magnolia Electric Co. It recalls a terribly cold night in Toronto when Steve and I watched Richard play at the long-gone Holy Oak where he played a cover of "Whip-Poor-Will".
How to say goodbye when you know it will be last time. I can't imagine grappling with this impossible task, and "Constant Love" arrives at the end, perfectly sparse, chilling and ethereal but always with tenderness warming the fires in hearth of it all.
You were a constant love
A shelter
from the storms above
You were a constant love
You're in my heart and in my blood
Richard’s work is a tapestry of grief and wonder, all the beautiful and hard parts of a life held together with tender thread. It’s easy to compare him to other greats of this world, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Jason Molina, Townes van Zandt. But that’s too easy maybe, and this is me grasping at straws on the best way to write through a memory. Richard makes you want to feel everything, even and sometimes especially the hardest parts of being alive. Because we are so lucky to be so, and we are so lucky to be able to do so together, and isn’t that what this is, what we’re here for, be together and feel joyful. Feel sad. Just feel.
Grief isn’t an easy or comfortable feeling, but it's a gateway to the memories of a life and this is the only gift the hardest parts of being alive can give us. Always remember, always have a story. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve only come to know grief more, and all I can do is remember all the words about a life and the times we have crossed. This is the thread holding all beautiful and difficult things bound together.
I don’t want to tell you too much about Richard’s final record because I want you to listen to it, listen to a man moving through grief with love and tenderness still in his heart. Listen to someone who had stories to tell, and left some of them here committed to wax and amorphous digital soundwaves.
dmitryloshadkin
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Last night, Lysh and I left the house briefly to see our friend Michael Feuerstack play, and while my own health hasn’t been great lately and I don’t stay out very long we made sure we could stay for him. He played a lovely cover of “Horses” by Palace Songs in honor of Richard’s passing. Mike was one of the folks who came up to Whitehorse to make Community Theatre with all of us, and is also just one of the most beautiful and talented songwriters out there. His latest record is Eternity Mongers, and you should buy it .
Art Fin