The Current - Dave Bidini of the Rheostatics on the band's new album

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Dave Bidini on what it means to be Canadian, why he loves the Great Lakes and what it was like to collaborate with some of Canada's most celebrated artists including Inuk throat singer and novelist Tanya Tagaq; poet and storyteller Chief Stacey LaForme; and the late Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip.

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing.

Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. My next guest is the only person to have been nominated for a Gemini, a genie, and a Juno, as well as CBC's Canada reads. His books include Tropic of Hockey and writing Gordon Lightfoot, and he publishes a hyper-local newspaper in Toronto called the West End Phoenix. He is also a founding member of the Rio Statics, and that band is celebrating its 45th anniversary with a new album called the Great Lakes Suite. Dave Bedini joins me in studio to talk about that new record,

but also to talk about Canada in this moment. And it is a particular moment. Dave, good morning. Hey, great to be here. The 45th anniversary of the Rio St Alex, is that actually possible? Yeah, I know. Man, my dad drove us in the family Buick down to the Edge Club, October 1980 to do our show.

And yeah, it's, uh, I think before we came on, we were talking about, like, you know, the prerogative of growing old and aging. And it's thrilling to me to look back at 45 years and to, you know, for a while there, it was survive, survive, survive, survive. And we survived. So every show is a bit of a victory lap that way. And now you make a suite based around the Great Lakes. How does something like this happen? Well, it's fun, too, you know, after all those years to decide on making a hard right, making a hard life.

We did the shows at the Horseshoe, 2023, where it was sort of the celebration of legacy. And that was fine, but I felt that we had squeezed all the juice out of that lemon. And we didn't want to be a band that was going out on the road and playing our 10 most popular songs. So we decided to try and create something completely new. That was really the driving force behind this project. It could have had many different organizing principles. This happened to be based around impressions, memories of the Great Lever. lakes. But it was really just an opportunity for us to do something completely different after

four and a half decades as a band. But is it you're falling asleep in this idea came to you? The best ideas come at you when you're falling asleep. In that little half moments. Yeah, man, you're kind of, you know, you're open to the forces of the universe. Yeah, and I thought about the Great Lakes and that's where that project kind of took life. What about the Great Lakes? I mean, we're right near one here. And yet, I mean, I don't know if you've seen these videos recently of these huge waves in the North of Lakes. It looks like, like Hawaii. do you know what I mean they're they're they're like oceans but they're not you can also find that during the wintertime at the Leslie Street spit during COVID I was down there for a fish boil with some friends as one does yeah oh it's great on my wife's birthday and the waves are epic so literally that that can also happen at the at the foot of our city you know we thought a lot about the Great Lakes partly because of the Ford administration savaging of Ontario place so for people who are elsewhere in the country I mean what are you talking about they they may not know uh what Ontario Place is and what a savagery. Yeah, of course. Cut down all the trees,

disassembled the longstanding legacy of Ontario Place, which was a gathering point for people in the city to go and sit by the shoreline, to cook, play, swim, drink fish. All of that is impossible now. The cladding has come up. They've sold the land to ostensibly build this massive spa, indoor spa. But you can't get to the shoreline anymore. So once the shoreline is taken away from you, I think you become aware of it a little bit more. So I think that was partly behind the Great Lakes, but also, you know, it's not like we looked at pictures of the Great Lakes when we were recording. It was more about the inculcated sense of water. The Great Lakes are great gathering points, right, for us as they were, at least they were for my family when I was growing up.

So that's kind of the leaping off point, the impressions of these massive bodies of water and the way they think they affected us growing up. How do you translate that into music? Yeah, you can't, we didn't deliberate or worry over that. I mean, I think we tried to take a completely impressionistic abstract sense. Now, one way I think we do tie that or we do address that directly in the record is through spoken word, right? So we have poems by Liz Howard, Ann Carson, Gordowny, Chief Stacey LaFourme, that literally directly address the nature of the Great Lakes and we're sort of weaving a tapestry behind it. Let me play a little bit of the piece that Gord contributes to this. I heard this the first time

and the hair on my arm stood up. Have a listen to this. I stepped into the water. It was clear and shallow and really warm. The flat rocks were entirely emerald green, carpeted and seaweed, gently swaying with the waves. It was so soft on my feet.

I wandered out a little further. There were many kids around me splashing and chasing and yelling. And I thought, in the water, you're alone. And I wasn't a great swimmer. I saw Seagull floating in the water a little away from me, and I splashed at it. And it just looked at me. I moved closer, and it still didn't fly away.

And I was about to say, hello, when the bottom fell away. It was the drop off. And I'd always heard about it, and I'd always been warned about it, and now I was past it. And I didn't know what was supposed to happen next. And the water closed over me, and I wasn't sinking, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't get back to the surface. I just sort of hung there. It was just quiet. David, Indy, tell me about that.

Yeah, that's a story about nearly drowning in Lake Ontario. I think that's an experience a lot of us share as Canadians and just people who've, you know, spend time on the water. Gord read that poem at the CBC during a waterkeeper's gala event. This is an organization that tries to protect. Advocates for clean water. And I was in the house when he... read that story, it always stayed with me. I also think, you know, and Gord was a great advocate for, for, for, um, water sustainability, conservancy. And also he was a great orator, which, um,

I don't think a lot of people had a chance to hear him just speak and tell stories. And when we're putting this together, uh, I also knew that were Gord alive, you know, we would invite him to be part of it. I think he would, he would, he would love to, would have loved to be part of the project, but we had this story. So we kind of deliberated. We talked to the family. And, and, and, And we got the green light. So we got in the studio one day and we just played that story on a loop and we performed to it, which was sort of a beautiful kind of union, I think, of what we were doing in the moment and what Gord had done in the past.

And yeah, man, it's great to hear his voice and it's great to have him, you know, on this record that exists in the moment in 2025. What do you think, I mean, it's a strange question, but what do you think he would make of the moment that we're in right now? This is like all Canadian, this is it, right? Yeah, I know. And he was somebody who, he loved the country. but the way that he talked about it was not with rose-colored glasses on either.

Totally. I think he really, you know, sort of came out of himself during his, you know, his time up north in Mussini and, you know, his addressing head on the nature of, you know, the First Nations in our country. Formed a lot of very, very strong alliances. And I think that really pointed him on a path towards, you know, a sort of political vibrancy, for lack of a better term, whereas I think before they played the middle, he played the middle a little bit more. I think he would be all over the issues facing our country at the moment. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often.

You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca. Is your home ready for the next big snowstorm? You can take action to help protect your home from extreme weather. Discover prevention tips that can help you be climate ready at keep it intact.ca.

How did you go about, because he's one of the people on this record, you have Alex Lifeson, Rush, you have Tenet Tagak on this. How did you go about selecting who you want to help capture the bodies of water that are on the record that I have in my hand? No master plan. My first email after the dream was to Alex, Lifeson, whom we performed a little bit with it at Western Phoenix Benefits and stuff. And I told him the general idea for this record and he texted me back, well, I can't golf for the rest of my life. and so he was in immediately called the rest of the guys they were in and then we just went in the studio and tanya kevin had been texting her uh during one of our studio days and said

i'm sorry kevin heard yeah our keyboardist and singer and he said um i'm texting tanya like should i invite her to the studio and it was like yeah you should absolutely invite her to the studio so it went out for dinner and it was a beautiful moment actually because we had Alex and Tanya in the band. And I think Alex just thought that Alex had no reference for Tanya, didn't know she was a throat singer. I think he thought she was a pop singer. And then we got in the studio and it was awesome to blow his mind having her perform with us. And when Tanya's in the studio performing, her performance is very much like her live performance. It's very kinetic, it's very physical, it's very visceral, and performative.

She's amazing She's amazing Yeah, 100% of what you hear on this record, too, is completely improvised. That was all done, you know, that was all done in the studio in the moment together. There was nothing sketched. out. One of the liberating things about this record, too, is there's no, I didn't have to worry. None of us had to worry about where the bridge went. None of us had to worry about intros or outroes whether we worked. We just played. We recorded 20 hours of music and then it was kind

of shaped afterwards a little bit. So you have Tanya on this record, Liz Howard, who's an Anishnave poet, Stacey Laforam, Chief, the Mississauga's of the credit. Tell me about, in speaking about the Great Lakes, why it's important to have indigenous representation as part of that conversation. You know, we wanted to make sure there were stories and impressions drawn from everywhere and from everyone. These are ancestral water bodies. Indigenous communities know them better than anybody in our country. The stories go deeper than any that we would have known as settlers. We made that mistake with music inspired by the Group of Seven in a lot of ways.

What do you mean the mistake? That was a record that was, as you said, inspired by the Group of Seven. Yeah, it never, you know, occurred to us that the Group of Seven had painted these, you know, wonderful, wild paintings of, you know, indigenous lands without any indigenous people in the paintings. So it was, yeah, we wanted to kind of correct that and make sure that there were indigenous voices. It was also, listen, important for us to perform with new artists, new performers, not just, you know, you and I know you can walk up and down the west end of Toronto and pull enough beautiful, brilliant vinyl, violinist guitar house producers out of their homes. We wanted to bring people in that, you know, people that you don't meet in the dog park.

Do you think differently, I mean, when did the Group of Seven record come out? Like that's 95. It's a long time ago. Yeah. Do you think differently now about how important it is that that, you know, that the aperture is wider than you did back then?

Yeah. Part of that is us as well, thinking differently as a nation. But do you think about that differently? Yeah. Yeah. Again, like, I think it's important to be, like a good, good Canadian, but I also think it's, you know, it's our job, I think, as artists to

performers to look for new voices, new stories, you know, look into, explore corners of the cultural landscape, the cultural world that you haven't before, and drawing inspiration from those new voices and new collaboration. Liz Howard said that it was the coolest thing she's ever done. And when she heard what you done, she cried. Yeah, it was incredible to hear that. Eyes open the night's slow static at a loss. To explain this place you've returned to from above.

Cedar along a broken shore, twisting and awake of fog. Poetry, too, like, listen, poetry is important to me. It's important to, you know, we publish this newspaper. We have a poem. issue. Poets don't get enough of a platform, so we're thrilled to be able to platform her and Chief Stacy as well, who's a brilliant poet on this record. How do you think, I mean, if you look at the Great Lakes, you look at it on a map, I mean, this is a shared thing, right? It's us. It's the United States. There's worries that maybe some giant pipe will come up in the United States

and suck the water into the lakes, but we have to figure out how that's going to work, right? We have to figure out how we're going to share this. How do you think about that now? Yeah, originally we had plan to tour all the Great Lake cities in the United States and Canada with this record, but we're not sure politically how we feel about doing that at the moment. We can maybe wait two years. But I also think you have to look for, I mean, it's such a divisive world and we do sort of tend to dwell on our differences, I think. I think that's one of the things that came out of elbows up, but I think it's important to look at the things that unify us and the things that we have in common. And certainly geographically, the Great Lakes is one of those things that we share.

The two nations share. We share these shorelines and these water bodies, and I think that's something we're celebrating. Is there a good argument to go to the other side of the border where those shorelines are and play and say, listen, we're from over there on the other side of the lake, but we're trying to figure out how that conversation is. We've spoken with people, we were just talking with Louise Penny,

at the border between Vermont and Quebec, and she's not going to the United States. We've spoken to a lot of other people who are. How are you thinking about that? I mean, I can see an argument for people, especially musicians, that you have to earn their bread, and they have to go down there, and that's where their crowd. That's where their audience is, and that's fine. And we've, you know, deliberated within our band, but listen, I still think there are, there's a massive percentage of Canadians that haven't seen Canada. And musicians, too, that just haven't played the breadth of the country.

It's more difficult now, like, touring is expensive. I think there should be a national subsidy for touring musicians, but that's another show. But, yeah, I think always kind of looking inward is never a bad thing for us when it comes to the pursuit of understanding who we are. And we should understand who we are as Canadians in Canada more often than we do as Canadians against where, you know, who lives south of us, which we do far too often comparing us to ourselves to, you know, the United States. We should really, yeah, we should really try to explore and understand our country more than we already do. I'm trying to think of a better way to see this country, and maybe it's not all great, but then in the back of a van traveling across Canada. Do you know what I mean?

Sometimes in snowstorms, sometimes in great weather. It can be hairy, but you see it as intimately as possible. Given that, I mean, how have you thought about the last year? Yeah, I mean, I don't, I'm not advocating for people to travel across Canada in the wintertime. But I think we have a ton of traction and rhythm in terms of exploring the country. You saw that last summer when more and more. more people were heading out on Highway 1 than ever before, not wanting to head south for their vacation. I think that's only going to build and build and build.

What does that elbows up thing mean to you? I mean, you're a hockey player. You know what this mean? What does it mean? We've always had our elbows up. When we were first starting the band, you know, you were pissed on if you sang about Canadian places. It was just the industry. There was just such a colonial nature to the industry. People would suggest that we trade in Canadian song names, places in our songs for Canadian. Do people actually say that? Yeah, yeah. That happened in the early days when we were being courted by certain major companies.

It was tough. So our elbows were always up. Like we were always sort of battling against the forces of cultural colonialism, certainly coming from the States and before that, the UK. So it's, you know, listen, my elbows are sharp. They've been for a long time. I've heard from people who play hockey with you. This is true.

I'm, let me apologize. But do you think, are we different now? Like, the way that we think about this country, we've been talking about whether people are buying Canadian still, and the travel thing is one thing. And then it gets cold. People want to head somewhere warmer. Are we, are we different now, do you think?

I feel we are. I just feel like we're growing. We're still a young country. And I feel like we're, maybe we're a young adult, where, you know, a few years ago, we were older teenagers, you know. And that's an exciting, I think that's exciting. for us. Old places are great too, but emerging places that are learning who they are and what they are and evolving, that's super exciting. And I think we're on that, we're on that curve.

What do you see as your role in this? You are a musician, you're a writer, you publish West End Phoenix, which is a great hyper-local newspaper. What is your role in fostering that, do you think? It's a lifelong pursuit. It has been for me since the early 1980s to kind of discover Canada, I guess. And I think there's a beauty in in not ever knowing it. And I think it's a life's work to try to try to understand who I am as a Canadian and what Canada is. And that will take me till the day I die. And at the end of it, I will probably never know the country. And I think that's beautiful.

There's a humility in that. Like that's it. You said something similar to the global mail. And I texted that quotation to you because I loved it. but it also spoke to this idea that the country is big and it's hard to wrap your head around it and that you might not be able to understand. Well, there's a real humility at the center of that, right? Yeah, there's that thing, too.

You know, people ask me about touring. And I, you know, what was touring like them? What's touring like now? And I'm like, well, it's still seven hours between Regina and Calgary. But it's great that there's seven hours between Calgary and Regina. Hey, man, you're forced to talk to your bandmates in the van. and there's a lot of places to stop, like small places to stop, run through a wheat field, you know, visit a town with a weird plaque in it.

Like, I just think that openness and that distance between places isn't a weakness so much as it is a strength. You just got to look for the strengths. And, yeah, like, I, there's still so much of the country that I haven't explored, that I want to explore. What do you still want to learn about the country? Yeah, I want to, I think I'm a bit of a story hoarder. two. I just want to hear another story. Is it still fun for you? 45 years in.

A lot of bands don't last that long. You're still friends with people. You're still having fun doing this. Yeah, we're on the other side of the other side of the mountain. Like that, you know, it's scarred coming up that one side. And, you know, we threw each other down the mountain a couple of times. But once you kind of get over that crest, you know, you know, it's a bit of a joyful kind of sliding the mud down. It feels great.

And one of the things we said is, as you came in, is getting older is neat, right? And there are things that you can do as you get older that maybe you can have done when you were a young buck. This is one of those kind of records. It feels like the kind of thing, you've done great music over the course of your career, but this is the kind of thing that it takes time to get to that point. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

No. And I'm so glad that this is one of the kind of payoffs of, you know, of the hours. that we put in, trying to figure out who we are. Listen, everybody treasures a third act, right? It's hard to find that third act. This is our third act. And it's a celebration of being alive at the end of the day. Fantastic.

Dave, Dave, thank you. Thanks, Matt. Dave Bedini is a founding member of the Rio Static. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.