Don't mistake Stephen Fearing for a novice. The Vancouver singer-songwriter has two albums, a raft of enthusiastic press notices and eleven years of experience on the club and festival circuits to his credit. Nonetheless, there's a strong sense of new beginnings about The Assassin's Apprentice, his first bona fide album for True North Records. It is the product of his first encounter with a world class recording studio and a major label budget. Not coincidentally, it's also the first time he's put his own distinctive stamp on his recorded work.
"Making this album I suddenly realized, 'Oh, this is what I do,'" laughs Fearing, 30. "It's all been a little foggy and indistinct in the past. Now I can hear a personal style in terms of how I play the guitar - my choice of chords and tunings - and in the lyrical images that come up repeatedly in the songs. It's pretty scary to finally start encountering and recognizing myself in my songs and on record."
Stripping back the full-bodied production that chracterized Blue Line (1990) and bringing his smoky voice and powerful guitar technique to the fore was Fearing's primary objective. Friend and inspiration Richard Thompson adds his trademark Telecaster guitar runs to "Down The Wire." Sarah McLachlan's unearthly vocal beauty is heard on the album's first single, "Expectations." Acoustic bassist and live sideman Paul Blaney anchors the songs throughout, while Ashwin Sood, who has recorded with McLachlan and Mae Moore, is featured on drums and percussion. Despite the accomplices, however, this is unquestionably Fearing's album from start to finish.
"I think people have always recognized Stephen's abilities as a songwriter, but you've had to see him live to know just how talented a guitarist and singer he can be," explains Bernie Finkelstein, the long-time manager of Bruce Cockburn who signed Fearing in 1991 and reissued Blue Line and Out To Sea (1988) on his own True North label. "With this album, Stephen's finally going to get his due as a musician and performer."
Much of the credit goes to producer Steve Berlin, one-time sax player with the legendary Texas band The Blasters and a member of Los Lobos since 1985. Berlin has worked with T-Bone Burnett on such landmark Los Lobos albums as By the Light of the Moon and How Will the Wolf Survive? and produced sessions for the Crash Test Dummies (The Ghosts That Haunt Me) and Leo Kottke (Great Big Boy). When Berlin heard the unadorned demos of Fearing's new material, he was keen to take the short trip North from his Seattle-area residence for a month of sessions at Jim Vallance's state-of-the-art Armoury Studios in Vancouver.
The album's title derives from some light-hearted studio banter. "Steve is a dark character, but very passionate and involved," explains Fearing. "By constrast, our recording engineer, Greg Reely, is cool and analytical to the point where he earned the title 'The Assassin.'" At one point, Berlin displayed a Reely-like quirk and was instantly dubbed "The Assassin's Apprentice."
The humorous nickname stuck both as the project's overall handle and as an apt title for the lead track, a searching examination of the darker reaches of human nature. Like many of Fearing's songs, "The Assassin's Apprentice" works on a number of levels and defies easy description. Essentially, it attempts to suss out why certain individuals are driven to acts of seemingly inexplicable violence and madness. "I had been thinking about the anger so many people carry around with them. Their rage overwhelms and engulfs them and then they explode. The idea is not to look at these people as aberrations but as very real products of society."
"The Assassin's Apprentice" exerts the strongest undertow on an album that is generally more personal than Blue Line. "Give It Up" deals with the fragile nature of love and friendship. "The Station" rocks out with finger-picking verve and full-blooded electric guitar. Another railway tune, "(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle," is a sprightly cover of the Hank Williams/Jimmie Davis standard. Two exquisite acoustic guitar instrumentals, "Lark and Duke" and "Martin's", are evidence of what Fearing means when he talks about his playing as a form of of becalmed meditation. "Down The Wire" he admits with mock horror, "is the first straight-forward love song I've ever written."
"What's interesting for me is that there is a lot less anger on this album. My last album Blue Line surprised me in terms of how angry some of the tunes were. There's more of a relaxed, mature center to these songs, which is good. It means there's been some motion and growth in my life over the last three years."
Motion has been a constant in Fearing's life. "The Longest Road," one of the new album's highlights, is a vivid autobiographical tale of his journey at the age of seven to relocate from Vancouver to Dublin, Ireland with his family.
By the mid-Eighties, Fearing was back in his Vancouver hometown. Along with Spirit of the West and Calgary singer-songwriter James Keelaghan (both of whom appeared on "Out To Sea"), he was classified as part of "The Western Invasion" of Celtic-influenced folk artists. "That was flattering, but it wasn't at all accurate," says Fearing. "There were some Celtic elements in what I did, but I saw myself more as a contemporary songwriter on the same continuum as Richard Thompson, not the more traditional players."
Fearing spent much of 1989 and 1990 on the road, touring the U.S. as part of an acclaimed bill with Keelaghan, Connie Kaldor and Ferron and appearing at such events as Peter Gabriel's World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) and the Reading, Edinburgh, and Belfast festivals. Blue Line was produced in London, England by famed folk/rock guitarist Clive Gregson and featured musical support by vocalist Christine Collister and pedal steel veteran B.J. Cole (Joan Armatrading, Chris de Burgh), among others. The reviews were excellent - "An important, energetic new artist on the scene," stated the bible of the British acoustic scene, Folk Roots.