You’re listening to the Hawk Morning Show with Scottie O, connecting you with people and events from around the Quad Counties and beyond.
Connecting you this morning with J.P. Cormier, the last time I had the chance to share a room with J.P., he was sharing a stage with Jimmy Rankin at the Jimmy Rankin Kitchen Party in Port Hawkesbury. Now I share a phone line with the man, J.P., welcome to the show. How you doing?
Scottie I’m good, I’m good.
Now, J.P., you’ve got a couple issues, you’re a hard-working man, you’re on the go all the time, correct?
Yeah, I thought I’d slow down when I get old, but it’s gone the opposite.
Imagine! Why would you want to slow down? You’ve got a number of shows.
I know, I know, I’ve been going pretty hard for about 44 years now, so yeah. Yeah, but if you just slowed down
You’d rather be busy than bored though, correct?
Well, that’s true, as soon as you stop working, you just die, so yeah. Keep going. Yeah, we don’t want that. We don’t want that at all. We don’t want that at all.
So J.P. has got a number of shows coming up with Robin’s Nest Productions, In and Around the Quad, starting next Thursday, a week from tomorrow at the Whycocomagh Waterfront Center from 7 to 9. Then you’re playing the Island Nesk on April 24th, Candid Brewing Company, April 30th, May 3rd, the Louisburg Playhouse, May 9th, Celtic Music Interpretive Center. Those tickets are available right now through Robin’s Nest Productions. You’re playing with a guy named Jake. Tell me a little bit about Jake, can you, J.P.?
Well I discovered him, literally discovered him at a music store in Toronto. How does that happen? After quite a number of years. I was just in there looking around for killing time, and he was, I heard this guitar playing and I didn’t recognize, because I know most of the pickers in this country, and I walked around the corner, there was this young kid, like 19, playing the guitar, and he just blew me away, and I sat down and played with him. His father videoed us playing, and it ended up online, and I offered him a job right then with me, and he didn’t take it right away, because I told so many people about him that he ended up getting a job with a major American bluegrass band. So he toured with them for a number of years, and then he came and worked with me and Dave Gunning as a bass player for one tour, and then he went back to fixing cars. He was unsure if he was going to try to do music full time, but last year he called me and said, that’s it, I’ve quit everything, I’m just going to pick. I said, okay, well come back to work with me then. So we did a major national tour last year from Halifax right to Vancouver and back, and this is the next leg of our journey together, I guess. It’s an interesting show, it’s not the normal JP show for sure, because it’s very guitar centric, and of course I’m doing some of the songs that people might want to hear, but it’s a very cool show. Jake is a monstrous guitar player, and I get to do things with him that I don’t really get to do with anybody else. It reminds me of playing with Bill Elliott when Bill was living. We just did a different show than I do normally, and that’s sort of the way things are with Jake.
So what do you end up doing then, JP? Do you end up doing a guitar duel? Do you go back and forth? Do you have major harmonies between the two of the guitars and make them sing?
Yeah, we do. I wouldn’t call it a duel. Not a competition. Just cut hits. But yeah, there’s a lot of intricacy and arrangements and harmonies, and it’s very cool. It’s a great show. We did it across Canada and we had a friggin’ blast, it was unbelievable. The further we got down the road through the dates, the more guitar players started showing up at the next night and the next night after that, you know what I mean? So it was really cool. He’s a good kid too, he’s funny as hell, and we have a great time on stage laughing at each other all night.
So if you want to see JP and Jake on stage at the Wyucocomagh Waterfront Center, the Island Nest, the Candid Brewing Company, the Louisburg Playhouse, or the Celtic Music Interpretive Center, you can find your tickets through Robbins Nest Productions. All links are on the Robbins Nest Productions Facebook page. Also you can get tickets at McKegian’s Pharmacy in Whycocomagh the Island Nest, the Candid Brewing Company, Louisburg Playhouse, or the Celtic Music Interpretive Center as well. JP, what else you got going on other than doing shows all the time? What’s going on in the life of JP?
Well, I’ve been, like last fall, right until February, was a massive amount of touring as I said, across Canada and then over to the UK for two weeks with Tim Eadie, and since I get back from that, I’ve just been finishing up a number of records that I’ve been producing on other artists that started last year, so yeah, I’m about to put the call out again to take some more clients on, the studio fills up fast, so yeah, I’ll be doing that this year and just the normal touring madness that happens in summer.
Can we name drop any other artists that you’ve been producing, can we name drop anybody?
Well, I just finished an album for David Mews, who would be Yogi’s son from the Deep Sea, made an entire album of mining songs that he wrote that’s incredible, and I just finished an album for young Ashley AuCoin of Chedicamp who, in my opinion, is probably the best female singer I’ve ever heard in my life, and I’m working on a guy from Halifax here that’s become a close friend through my YouTube channel, and Mark Smith, his name is, and he’s a really talented, kind of a blues-oriented singer-songwriter, his record’s getting finished over the next couple of weeks, and I also started an album on a crew you probably know, I would think, called Our Father’s Fools. Yes, they’re really good. Yeah, they’ve had a good deal of success with what they’ve done, but they’ve sort of postponed finishing the record, so I’m waiting for them to come back, because I really thought that album was going places, so yeah, it’s just, it’s been crazy, there’s been a lot of stuff going on. There was another young woman that came up last summer named Joanna Bronson, she cut her first album, singer-songwriter, and she, I didn’t even know this had happened, but this song went to number one on the indie charts in Ontario, and it stayed there for three or four weeks, and so she’s getting a lot of attention, I think, now possibly from major labels, so yeah, it’s been a good year, it’s been a good couple of, 18 months has been really busy lately, yeah.
Never mind just singer-songwriter JP Cormier, it’s singer-songwriter, producer, and now promoter, because you’re selling that good, dude.
Well these guys are really, you know, you know about me, we’ve known each other a long time, like I, when I was young I got very little help, and that was the way of the industry back then, you’d ask people to do things for you, and give you a hand up, and everybody just ignored you, I think that was sort of the way it was, and I always swore when I got to the point where I could, I would always help other artists every time I was asked, and so that’s, it’s a great, it’s a great pleasure for me to see these young, new people coming up, because somebody’s gotta come up behind us, we can’t just fade away and then nothing coming down the pike, you know, so, if we can help those people, that’s what we need to do.
I get it, JP Cormier on the line with me this morning, got a couple of shows coming up, and when I say a couple I mean five, around the quads, at the Whycocomagh Waterfront Center, the Island Nest, Candid Brewing Company, Louisburg Playhouse, Celtic Music Interpretive Center, if any one of those are your home theaters to go see, you know what I mean, like your home venue, go, go see JP and Jake on stage.
JP, I appreciate you taking some time this morning to talk to me on the radio, I appreciate it completely, dude.
Well, you’re the man, and I also want to just quickly say that I’m really proud to be going back to Louisburg. I held the record there at one time for the longest, the most years played in a row, it was like 25 or 26 years in a row I played there, and when the pandemic happened it ruined my streak and I haven’t been back there since, which is really a heartbreaker, because I look forward to that gig every year, and so now I’m finally going back there, I’m not sure why they, well, they probably had the same hard, difficult time that everybody else did from COVID, so. So do we call this a homecoming then?
Do we call it a homecoming to the Louisburg Playhouse?
It’s been years since I’ve been there, I just can’t believe I’m going back, it’s amazing.
And the thing is, if you’ve never seen a JP show, let me just tell you, if you haven’t seen a JP show, JP is not just a masterful guitar player, he’s not just a great singer, he’s a great storyteller, and joke teller. Some of them are groaners, I’ll be honest with you, man, some of them are groaners, and you’ll be in the audience going, oh, but they’re funny, funny, that makes you think, and I just, I need to throw that out and give the devil his due, if you will, right?
I do my best, I try to laugh at everything, so it’s the biggest part of my life, is laughing. It’s a good thing. I cut up all my, but like, if you were around us all the time, even my wife is a terrible prankster, quick on her feet, very on her heartbeats, you know, and that’s how we spend our time, when we’re together, it’s just trying to crack each other up, so yeah, it’s good, it’s a good way to live.
That’s a good thing, it’s a very good thing, listen, JP, every time I get a chance to play this on the radio, I’m going to, and I have the chance because I’m talking to you right now, I love Kelly’s Mountain, and I’m gonna play Kelly’s Mountain, because I can, because I have a reason to, I got JP on the phone, I’m playing Kelly’s Mountain, I don’t care what anybody says. You know that song, that song’s 30 years old this year, I think. Is it really? Yeah, I wrote it, I mean, I recorded it in 20, 31 years, actually. Okay. I wrote it in 2000, sorry, I wrote it in 95. Yeah, did you know the story behind that?
No, I was gonna ask you the story, because I love the song, and every time, like, it’s in my personal playlist, I’ll tell you that, that I am in the car, that’s one of those things where the… Go ahead, sir. It’s one of those things where the windows go down, and the sunroof opens, even if it’s, like, snowy. All right, go ahead, tell me the story, I need to know the story, I need to know the story of the song.
The story’s a good one, it’s short, I won’t keep you long, but when I was a young man, I was writing all the time, I was determined to be a writer, and I was a Stephen King fan, and Stephen always said, the only way to become a writer is write, and if you don’t like it, throw away, just start again. And so I did that with songs, and I would get ideas, and I’d write them on anything I could grab, and I had a file folder full of material that I had, you know, grabbed at the last second and wrote something down on, looking through the file one day, and I found a piece of an old pizza box lid that was all full of grease, there was still a piece of cheese stuck to it, and on the lid was written, if I could only fly, if I could build a bridge, and that’s how the song got written.
Really?
That old pizza box lid with the greasy, terrible handwritten line on it, that’s where the song came from.
Now, every time that I hear this song, and I’m going to play it in about 11 seconds, every time I hear this song, all I want to think of is the old, greasy cheese pizza.
Yeah, you’re going to get hungry every time you hear it now.
All right, JP, I appreciate you, again, JP’s got shows with Jake at the Whycocmagh Waterfront Center, the Island Nest, Candid Brewing Company, Louisburg Playhouse, Celtic Music Interpretive Center, if those are one of your home venues, get your tickets, if they’re one of your away venues, make the trip to go see JP and Jake on stage. Sir, thank you for taking some time this morning.
You’re quite welcome, Scottie, keep up the good work, we wouldn’t be out here without you, bud. I appreciate it.
I appreciate it. JP Cormier, Kelly’s Mountain, next!
If you’d like to be a guest on the Hawk Morning Show, text us, 902-625-1015. If you missed any of today’s conversation, you can find it on our website, yourquadcounties.ca.
