It all began with a casual encounter in a coffee shop. Mark Bragg is a familiar face in a lot them in his hometown of St. John’s, Newfoundland, and for several specific reasons feels he is often most creatively productive in such an environment.
So, one day while seeking his usual sanctuary, Bragg happened to notice Liam Ryan of the band Swimming at a table messing around with beats on his laptop. Intrigued, Bragg made a bold move, asking to take some of the beats home with him and adding some raps. Liam agreed, and Bragg ended up writing an entire album around those beats.
Although Liam Ryan’s own EP ultimately only included a couple of Bragg’s lines, his own new six-song collection that came out of this unexpected collaboration, Ashes, is another unique addition to Bragg’s singular body of work, which Exclaim’s Vish Khanna compared to, “Beefheart, Waits, Springsteen, Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano, and Bobcat Goldthwait maybe,” while praising Bragg for his “completely unhinged imagination.”
If you’re able to wrap your head around that, then steel yourself for a song cycle centred around fictional female characters trying their best to navigate the rampant misogyny on the mean streets of St. John’s.
“I work with music first, and that informs the narrative,” Bragg explains. “These beats I got from Liam were pretty dark. That was also around the time when there were some pretty heinous crimes in the news, fueled as near as I could tell by misogyny and toxic masculinity, amongst other things. The album is not about this per se, but a lot of the characters and colours mirror these events. In these characters, I see strong women enduring violent boys full of hate.”
To record Ashes, Bragg once again teamed up with veteran Toronto producer Daryn Barry, who had helped make Bragg’s previous albums Winter (2018), Your Kiss (2011) and The Reckless Kind (2002). Tracks were recorded at Terra Bruce Studios in St. John’s by engineer Mark Feener, with Bragg’s usual cast of players anchored by drummer Chris Donnelly (Tim Baker, Kellie Loder), along with guitarist Brad Power, bassist Mark Neary and keyboardist Luke Power.
The level of trust they’ve all developed over the years gave Bragg the confidence to venture into previously uncharted songwriting territory, with the sounds they conjured reflecting the album’s challenging themes. Indeed, as we follow the characters’ progress throughout the album, from “Dead Boy Man” to “The Planet Crumbled,” the scenes grow increasingly chaotic until it’s clear that some kind of apocalyptic event has occurred, and the dead continue to pursue these women.
Bragg says bluntly, “I hate anything I did when I was getting started, so I’d like to believe that represents improvement with each project. My biggest influence on this record was probably Nick Cave. His work gives us permission to go as deep and as dark as we need to in order to truly represent our characters. We shouldn’t need permission I know, but I scare easily.”
As someone who copes with epilepsy, Bragg is used to feeling as if the world could change in the blink of an eye. This, in some ways, explains his reputation as an uninhibited live performer. Seeing Bragg in concert can often be cathartic for audiences, and with Ashes, he has finally translated that experience in the studio.
