Composer and performer Friendly Rich earned his PhD in music education with a thesis entitled “Musical Playgrounds as a Vehicle for Community Development,” and he has incorporated ideas of playfulness and social consciousness in his many projects. Over the past two decades, he has made nearly two dozen albums, composed soundtrack music for The Tom Green Show and a podcast called Industry Tactics, and played with many different musicians, including his longtime touring band, The Lollipop People.
His new EP, A Modest Proposal, which comprises four songs written with Tom Juhas and features the backing band Joan Smith and the Jane Does, opens with a blast of righteous anger at American gun culture with vicious lyrics (“A school is a school just until there is blood / Then it’s a factory for killing our young”) sung in a melodramatic vocal style amid an aggressive backdrop of horns, strings, guitar, and an outraged vocal chorus. The dark times are upon us, he sings, and the modest proposal is “Put down your guns and try love.” The three remaining tracks are less furious though almost equally dark, with themes of regicide in “Spotted Dick” and sadness in the ponderous closer, “Last Will & Testament.”
Friendly Rich has followed that up with a quite different recording: Bright, an album of duets with Christine Duncan, a renowned singer, songwriter, teacher, improviser, and leader of the Element Choir, was produced by Kevin Breit and released digitally at the end of December and on vinyl in February. Bright’s eight tracks alternate back and forth between the two songwriters, with the cheeky centrepiece “I Want to Plant Some Corn” cowritten by the duo and Breit. They could be called love songs, although with a melancholy underpinning and dark humour. The happy couple in “We Will Go On Together,” for example, definitely have their doubts. “You’re all that I wanted and all that I’ve known / And it’s better than being alone,” sings Duncan, while Rich follows with “You dangle your love at me and use it to punish me, but I know this is where I belong.” Duncan’s beautiful voice is a perfect counterpart to Rich’s deep bass, and presenting them against the backing of the fabulous Upper York Mandolin Orchestra, plus Aaron Davis on piano and Michael Herring on bass, gives the project an intriguing Tom Waits-Eastern European-Kurt Weill vibe, from the gorgeous opener “Pluto” through to the sweet closer “Millicent.”
Mary Dickie is a Toronto music and arts journalist whose work has been published in a variety of different publications over the past couple of decades, including Impact, Eye Weekly, Maclean’s, ELLE Canada, The Toronto Sun, FASHION magazine and IN Toronto. She is also a member of the Polaris Music Prize jury.