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MANY TRANSFORMATIONS OF DAVID USHER

Author: Mike Ross
Source: Edmonton Sun (url)
Date: November 7, 2003

If you live for the unexpected, the confounding, for something "different," David Usher might be your guy.

Not that he's psychotic or anything - he is in fact one of the most stable rock musicians we've ever run into - but you never know what he'll do or say.

For instance, "I've lit a few menorahs in my time," Usher says in a recent phone interview, responding to a query about his unusual upbringing - Jewish economist for a father, Thai Buddhist artist for a mother, growing up in French-speaking Montreal. Don't see that every day.

Playing at Red's tomorrow night, Usher says this cultural melting pot provided him with a unique perspective on life. "Different" is the key word.

"I think it was easier to see different sides of people, easier to tell the good from the bad," he says. "I never really fit in. I could float into the Jewish culture and float into the Buddhist-Thai culture, but I'm not really either of those things. Only peripherally. As a result, I think I was also able to view things differently."

His career path certainly is different. After studying political science in college, Usher decided to drop out and become a rock musician. Fans will know the rest of the story. Moist was one of the biggest Canadian rock bands of the mid-to-late '90s until it more or less broke up when the singer went mellow and solo in 1998. Usher won't use the word "outgrown" to describe his general abandonment of rocking out on record - "because it sounds like you're negating what you did," he says. He prefers to say that he's "no longer interested" in going down that road (at least until the Moist reunion five years from now, eh?).

Sure it makes sense. In 90% of cases, when a musician ages, they mellow, so why fight it?

Usher laughs, "I guess so."

Which brings us to another aspect of this artist you might be surprised to learn: Usher is 37 years old. That means that when he was last in town with Moist causing all those teenage girls to scream and swoon, he was doing it as a 33-year-old man! And we thought he was a full-fledged member of Generation Y (also known as Generation Why Me!).

Full of surprises, this guy, and that includes his third and most interesting solo album to date, Hallucinations, on which he unveils a spine-tingling falsetto on the haunting track I'm Coming Down. The song contains the highest note he and probably any other male rock singer, except for Prince, has ever sung. Usher says he'd never sung falsetto in public until that song. Now he has to.

"When I first started doing it and hitting that note, I thought, 'Oh my God. What have I got myself into?' But it seems to be working out now. It's probably the highest note I can sing - and I have to hit it every night."

Music critics, among others, often don't know what to make of Usher's remarkable transformations.

He says he's been hearing a lot of discussion about Hallucinations.

"Certain people are loving the record and certain people think it's a bit more of a difficult listen," he says.

"I've had criticism that it's not as heavy as Moist, that it's not as intimate as Little Songs (his first solo album) or not as catchy as Morning Orbit (his second).

"But I always hope my records will be different than one another. The thing I want to do the least is what I did 10 years ago. I definitely like my solo records to sound different than the band records - otherwise there's no point in being a solo artist."

What will he think of next? He says he's not sure. After a tour of Thailand, where he is a bona fide celebrity who gets accosted walking down the streets of Bangkok, he may know better what his next "different" project will be.

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