More music to come from Greg MacPherson

This past Tuesday, local singer-songwriter Greg MacPherson put out Mr. Invitation, his first album in five years. If all goes according to plan, the 10-song CD won’t be the only new music he releases this year.

MacPherson is currently working on recordings with Nova, the band he plays in with Jackie Hogue (drums) and Molly McCracken (keyboards).

“We’ve got five songs done and we’re gonna do a few more and probably put out an EP in August,” MacPherson said during a recent interview for an article that appears in the current issue of The Uniter.

In addition to the Nova release, he might have another solo disc coming out in the fall.

“The great thing is, for me, because I haven’t put out a record in over four years, I’ve got enough (songs written) for probably three, four records,” MacPherson said. “So it looks like, at the end of this year too, probably in the fall, I’m gonna put another record out of solo music ... on my European label, which is Play/Rec.”

The record will include some songs MacPherson recorded himself.

“I almost used them for Mr. Invitation, but Mr. Invitation became much more of a band project than I expected it to,” he said. “Going back to how much fun and how exciting and satisfying the process was, that garnered enough really nice recordings that we didn’t need to use any of the stuff I did at home.”

“So that’s exciting, too” he added. “I might have three releases in one year. (I’m) making up for lost time.”

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One song on Mr. Invitation, titled West End, started out as a Nova song. MacPherson, Hogue and McCracken - all of whom work in Winnipeg’s West End - created a list of possible song topics.

“On the list was some of the people we knew in common that were inspiring to us, and one of them was a woman that Jackie and I both knew from the West Central neighborhood named Frida,” MacPherson said.

“Winnipeg’s a big bowl of soup basically, it’s like a big pot of stew. There’s all these different flavours, and one of the strongest flavours in our city is the urban inner city poor and particularly the First Nations community. I’ve been told recently that 50 per cent of aboriginal males in West Central don’t graduate from high school.

“And so the pot of stew that we’re all part of has a very particular flavour and it doesn’t taste good. None of us in this city can walk around and live our lives here and not be affected by that. Regardless of how far we stick our heads under a rock, you can’t help but notice some of the hardship and trauma, the post-colonial problems that exist in this city.

“It’s a city founded on conflict. From the two rivers hitting, to the white folks coming out west, to class, to the segregation of the city from north of the river to south of the river, the rich and the poor, the tracks dividing the multicultural community from the more European community. So I think that (the song West End) is reflective of that kind of perspective that I have on that social reality here in Winnipeg - specifically about the West End area.

“There’s so much beauty here. It’s like a rough, traumatized, fragmented, gorgeous city where there’s so much life. A lot of it’s frustrating and heartbreaking, but a lot of it’s inspiring and there’s people whose lives could break your heart or they could make you feel like anything’s possible. There’s a lot of work to do. I think that that song’s my way of trying to highlight the beauty in that.”