Mark Perry - Northwest (2021)

Canadian singer-songwriter Mark Perry gets introspective and earthy on his 13th album, Northwest.

"I’m lucky. I live in the Pacific Northwest region of British Columbia. It’s easy to be inspired by mountains, rivers, the Pacific Ocean and incredible people."

On Northwest, Perry draws upon his Northern BC surroundings, highlighting songs that offer a glimpse of, what is to many, an exotic and remote place. The songs offer a peek at our emotional connection to landscapes, our dependency on its resources, our periods of isolation, and our human resilience, especially when we experience loss, and how we find our way out of it.

“I was reading and rereading Emily Carr’s great little book, Klee Wyck, at the time. COVID was settling in. Her writings about the demise of a way of life on the West Coast of BC seemed to correlate with the way the entire planet was going,” says Perry.

The album is very much a product of the pandemic, written and recorded remotely across Canada with Perry sending songs back and forth from his Smithers home studio to his producer in the Yukon and musicians in Victoria, Toronto, Whitehorse and Telkwa.

In his signature anecdotal style, Perry sings about real people and historic events. ‘Fish Boats is about the demise of a once-thriving west coast industry. ‘Golden Spruce’ is about the legendary story of Grant Hadwin, who, in a highly controversial act of protest, went missing after he felled a revered Sitka Spruce tree – Kiidk’yaas on Haida Gwaii – considered sacred by the Haida people. ‘Gumboot Girls’ celebrates the story of droves of young women who, in the 1970s, migrated away from urban settings and settled in rural areas across North America, many on the north coast of British Columbia. ‘Cold Road’ refers to the tragic bus crash of a Saskatchewan hockey team. In other songs like ‘Rosary’ and ‘Who Am I?’, Perry gets more existential, exploring the human dilemma we experience when, what we perceive as ‘normal’, suddenly wavers.

“Who Am I? is a big question many of us pack around," says Perry. "The COVID-19 pandemic tore down many of our perceptions... We humans stumbled and began to show cracks. We began to question what ‘normal’ ever was."