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WORK TITLE: Berlin-Warszawa Express
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://eamonmcgrath.ca/
CITY: Toronto
STATE: ON
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eamon_McGrath
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Singer-songwriter.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Eamon McGrath is a Canadian singer-songwriter who released his first album, Wild Dogs in 2008. McGrath went on to release five more albums between 2009 and 2015, including 13 Songs of Whiskey and Light, Young Canadians, and Exile. Following these successes, McGrath authored a fictionalized memoir about a touring musician, and the book was published as Berlin-Warszawa Express in 2017. Discussing the challenges of balancing his artistic endeavors in an online NOW interview with Carla Gillis, McGrath explained: “It’s hard at first to say no to things, but that’s the second-best answer you can give both to yourself and others. It allows you to focus on what you’ve already committed to and gives someone ample time to find another option. It’s worse to go back on something you’ve committed to and admit defeat to yourself and others because you’ve overstretched your workload.”
This same focus is evident in Berlin-Warszawa Express, and the book follows a Canadian folk musician touring Europe with his fellow performers. As the musician traverses Europe by train, he comments on crumbling urban wastelands and the strange landscapes between cities and suburbs. The overall tone and depiction of the setting is gray, but the musician encounters a lively cast of characters along the way. Despite struggling to make ends meet, the musician revels in long nights of drinking, gigs both terrible and transcendent, and strange encounters. The tolls of constant travel are displayed without glorification, but moments of joy and surprise inevitably occur. Yet, the musician finds that he is becoming more and more reliant on alcohol to handle the tour, and this reckoning arrives with a creative reckoning as well: How does and artist remain creative while struggling to survive? The personal and emotional sacrifices inherent in maintaining this balance are myriad, and the musician rightly wonders whether or not these sacrifices are worth it in the end.
As McGrath noted in an online Open Book interview, “the title served as not only a nod to the Berlin-Warszawa Express itself—the train on which some of the book actually occurs—but also alludes to the railroad, that seemingly infinite, long line of transportation that the text of the book mirrors. I wrote some of the book while riding on the Berlin-Warszawa Express, about the Berlin-Warszawa Express, and the text is kind of an ‘expressway’.” The author added: “Before the working title of Berlin-Warszawa Express, it was only untitled. Just pages and pages of hungover, handwritten scrawl. When I finally typed everything out, and arranged it into a cohesive narrative, that was the only thing that came to mind. It just shone so brightly on the page compared to all the darkness around it. It had a rhythm, it had a pulse, it had a direct correlation to the narrative.”
Praising the fictionalized memoir in Publishers Weekly, a critic advised that “it’s less a narrative and more a mosaic, a playlist of moments that define a life or a story.” Jade Colbert, writing in the Globe and Mail Online, was also impressed, asserting that the book “goes beyond literary-ruin porn: a wrestle with the European ideal from a region where it is most strikingly new.” Offering further applause on the Exclaim Website, Ian Gormely remarked: “Evocative without become overly romantic, Berlin-Warszawa Express expertly captures the life and mind-set of the starving artist, offering convincing proof that they are more fulfilled than we could ever imagine.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly. March 27, 2017, review of Berlin-Warszawa Express.
ONLINE
Exclaim!, http://exclaim.ca/ (May 5, 2017), Ian Gormely, review of Berlin-Warszawa Express.
Globe and Mail Online, https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/ (May 12, 2017), Jade Colbert, review of Berlin-Warszawa Express.
NOW, https://nowtoronto.com/ (November 8, 2017), Carla Gillis, author interview.
Open Book, http://open-book.ca/ (November 8, 2017), author interview.
Eamon McGrath
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eamon McGrath
Birth name Eamon McGrath
Born Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Origin Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Genres punk rock
indie rock
folk
Years active 2006–present
Website http://eamonmcgrath.ca
Eamon McGrath is a Canadian musician and writer from Edmonton, Alberta and currently based in Toronto.[1] On his own, his live performances are most often folk-oriented, where McGrath plays songs from his discography on acoustic instruments, but with a band the live show takes on a much more high-energy, punk rock influenced vein.[2][3]
McGrath records primarily on his own at his home in Toronto and releases albums independently in Canada and through a number of record labels, including Canada's White Whale Records who signed McGrath at the tail end of 2008.[4] 2008 also saw McGrath begin a rigid touring schedule which continued up until the end of 2014.[5]
Young Canadians was released on April 10, 2012.[6][7] The record is produced by David Carswell and John Collins of The Evaporators.[8]
In 2012, McGrath performed at Sackville, NB's Sappyfest 7 with Chris Thompson, Julie Doiron and Mark Gaudet of Eric's Trip playing songs from Young Canadians.[9] McGrath also occasionally collaborates with Doiron and members of the Cancer Bats in Julie Doiron & The Wrong Guys, featuring newer, louder renditions of Doiron's songs.[10]
Exile, the follow-up to Young Canadians, was released in the form of three separate digital EPs over the course of nine months, concluding with a full LP in September 2014. Exile - Part One was released on October 15, 2013 followed by the 2nd installment in March, 2014[11] while the full-length conclusion was released digitally and in LP format on September 9, 2014. A Canadian and European tour followed.[12] Alongside Dan Mangan, Rae Spoon and Gavin Gardiner of The Wooden Sky, McGrath scored music for North Country Cinema's feature film The Valley Below, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, 2014.[13]
On October 21, 2014 Toronto's New Damage Records released a split 7" by Eamon McGrath and Edmonton-based punk band SLATES, where both artists cover each other's material.[14]
McGrath's first book, a fictionalized tour memoir entitled Berlin-Warszawa Express, was released in spring 2017 by ECW Press.[15] In the same year, he collaborated with Julie Doiron in the band Julie and the Wrong Guys, whose debut album was released on Dine Alone Records.[16]
Discography[edit]
Wild Dogs (Champion City Records, 2008)
13 Songs of Whiskey and Light (White Whale, 2009)
Peace Maker (White Whale, 2010)
Young Canadians (White Whale, 2012)
Pegasus (Independent, 2013)
Exile (Aporia, 2014)
EAMON MCGRATH
At 23, Eamon McGrath has a list of accomplishments under his belt that would echo that of a writer twice his age: 250+ songs written and recorded, album of the year credits, multiple tours through the UK, Canada and Europe, and stints playing in the backing bands for both the legendary Daniel Johnston and Julie Doiron.
McGrath’s style is constantly changing and his shows range from sweaty, bombastic, punk and noisy garage-rock inspired barnburners, to quiet, intimate country best fit for a Western saloon. In the span of a single concert, and sometimes in the span of a song, heart-wrenching confessional lyrics pave the highway towards string-shredding guitar solos and an adolescent howl like no other.
“Young Canadians” takes his classic country/punk live show dichotomy even further. It’s dark, yet, beautiful with badass, 90s-era pacific northwest workouts like “Rabid Dog” and “Saskatoon, SK” lying next to the dirty soul in “Pain of Love” and quiet, haunting odes to time lost (”Auditorium”), all filtered through a youthful, fist-in-the-air nod to Canadiana.
“Young Canadians” is McGrath’s 3rd official release following “13 Songs of Whiskey and Light” (2009), and “Peace Maker” (2010). For Young Canadians, McGrath headed back into Vancouver’s JC/DC Studios with John Collins (New Pornographers) and Dave Carswell (Destroyer) and recorded it all within the span of one wild week.
It’s a grand novel bridging gaps between McGrath’s Albertan, prairie roots, and the ever-present spirit of punk rock that has come to define his life. McGrath sums up “Young Canadians” on the first track: ”My life could be a broken record by Canada’s Ramones. Eternal adolescents: I’m calling out your names. Rock and roll won’t ever be the same”.
“There’s an openness and honesty to the lyrics that belies his tender age and he can carry a song with the slenderest of help…he sounds around double his age and he sounds like someone who will still be worth listening to when he is forty two.”
- Americana UK
“The teenage kick in his raw Saturday night energy is even more authentically prodigious…his rasping Waitsian voice suggests an unlived lifetime spent in low company in smoke-filled bars. (4 stars)”
- Uncut Magazine
The Entitled Interview, with Eamon McGrath
DATE
June 15, 2017
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In his literary debut, Berlin-Warszawa Express (ECW Press), musician and songwriter Eamon McGrath tackles a question that plagues artists in every medium: does art necessitate suffering? He wonders if there a purpose to the isolation and loneliness that comes with the artistic lifestyle - especially the long tour away from home.
Fictionalizing his own experiences and those of his friends and colleagues, McGrath explores the strange remove of the touring musician's experience and its emotional repercussions. Traversing the gritty venues of hip European music scenes via the titular train route, the fictionalized memoir is an anguished love letter to the sacrifices art demands of those it inspires.
We're pleased to have Eamon on Open Book today as part of our Entitled interview series to talk about the route that inspired his title and more. He tells us about the beat poet referenced in the title, explains why a classic American novel title has stuck with him, and shares some possible names for upcoming books and albums.
Open Book:
Tell us about the title of your newest book and how you came to it.
Eamon McGrath:
The Berlin-Warszawa Express is the name of the train service that runs between Berlin and Warsaw twice daily. My book, titled Berlin-Warszawa Express, is a stream-of-consciousness, fictionalized memoir that writes about touring Europe on the train systems that link the countries there, and the title served as not only a nod to the Berlin-Warszawa Express itself—the train on which some of the book actually occurs—but also alludes to the railroad, that seemingly infinite, long line of transportation that the text of the book mirrors. I wrote some of the book while riding on the Berlin-Warszawa Express, about the Berlin-Warszawa Express, and the text is kind of an “expressway”. The method by which I wrote it was influenced by some of the writers of the Beat movement—I even mention Sal Paradise and Old Bull Lee in the book—and so I thought that having “Express” in the title would even subtly reference William S. Burroughs and his work, Nova Express.
OB:
What in your opinion is the most important function of a title?
EM:
A title should suggest what a story is about but also not give any of it away. It should be a sweeping generalization, and also reflect with pinpoint accuracy the contents of the work. The best titles are multi-layered and paradoxical, specific yet open-ended. The Catcher in the Rye, for example, is a great example of that: it alludes to a minute detail of the book, that’s an integral part of the story of Holden Caulfield’s journey through New York City; but it actually has nothing to do with his three days spent there specifically. It draws you into the story itself, in a search for the connection between the title and the relationship to the story, and once you understand that small and detailed connection between those two things you understand the story and the message behind it so much better.
OB:
What is your favourite title that you’ve ever come up with and why?
EM:
I have a song called “Running From the Cops” that I’m pretty proud of. It’s about a deteriorating relationship, in the sense that the two people in the song are under a figurative “arrest”, like their love itself is running from the law in a last-ditch attempt at freedom. But it’s also like the two characters in the song could be Bonnie and Clyde, running together from the authorities, their lawlessness what keeps them together. It’s also about the thrill of being in the midst of a high-speed chase. It’s about all these things, and none of them at the same time; at its simplest form it’s also just about getting dumped, being really down and out.
OB:
What about your favourite title as a reader, from someone else’s work?
EM:
I’m a huge Replacements fan, Paul Westerberg is kind of the pinnacle of the rock and roll literary world in my opinion. Left of the Dial is a great title. Again, it’s alludes to everything the song is about, and none of it at all: it’s about his band tuning into college radio, on low-frequency radio stations, and hearing their songs on tour. But it’s also about how figurative “signals” fade out from one city to the other, how you meet these people on the the road who you develop these intensely personal connections with and don’t see them again till the next time you roll through town. It’s also about being totally left-field, totally out of the mainstream, and written during the Reagan era. It’s also just a great, simple rock song. So that kind of stuff I find really interesting. As far as books go I love Shakey, that biography about Neil Young: it’s his nickname—Neil’s friends call him Shakey, his film production company is Shakey Pictures—but it’s also such a great description of how the book itself is written, it’s this jolted, almost jaundiced, frantic book that jumps in and out of a non-fiction biography, to music industry mythologies, to straight-up music journalism, sometimes within the span of a single paragraph. The Catcher in the Rye, like I was saying earlier, is also a great title: so mysterious, so murky, so unassuming, yet so important to the message and content of the story. I love that kind of stuff.
OB:
Did you consider any other titles for your current book and if so what were they? Why did you decide to go with the title you eventually picked?
EM:
Before the working title of Berlin-Warszawa Express, it was only untitled. Just pages and pages of hungover, handwritten scrawl. When I finally typed everything out, and arranged it into a cohesive narrative, that was the only thing that came to mind. It just shone so brightly on the page compared to all the darkness around it. It had a rhythm, it had a pulse, it had a direct correlation to the narrative, it had a “Z” which looks good from a design perspective, it was perfect for the story.
OB:
What are you working on now?
EM:
At the moment I’m working on two separate possible follow-ups to Berlin-Warszawa Express, both with only working titles: one draft is currently called Riding the Dog and the other draft is currently called Wealth. Both will probably change drastically though, and so the titles will most likely follow suit. I’m also working on the follow-up to my last album, which was called Exile, and the working title for that has been Just Kids—kind of an allusion to what you spend your 20s being, just a kid. Trying to let people know they don’t have to grow up too fast.
________________________________________
With over 300 songs written and recorded, album of the year credits, multiple continent-spanning tours, Eamon McGrath has developed a body of work that could rival that of any artist 15 years his senior. This is the house that punk rock built: a fierce DIY attitude and constantly changing style has guided McGrath across the globe on countless tours, stories from which were cultivated in innumerable journal entries and song lyrics, eventually becoming the evocative and emotional journey that forms the backbone of Berlin-Warszawa Express. He is based in Toronto, Ontario.
Eamon McGrath's time-management tips for multi-tasking musicians
As he prepares to launch his first book, the Toronto-based artist offers some advice for creatives doing many things to survive
BY CARLA GILLIS APRIL 30, 2017 2:00 PM
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Eamon McGrath.jpg
Chris Wedman
Eamon McGrath
EAMON McGRATH on Saturday (May 6) at Circus Books & Music (886 Danforth), 4 pm, free live performance and reading; and Monarch Tavern (12 Clinton), 7 pm, with Dave Bidini, Joel Thomas Hynes and others, $5-$10. Facebook event page.
Few musicians can make music full-time these days, instead supplementing their incomes in myriad ways. Eamon McGrath might be the most extreme example of the multi-tasking artist.
The Toronto-based singer/songwriter is a newly minted author of Berlin-Warszawa Express (ECW Press), which attempts to answer the question “Should you suffer for your art?” within the context of a real-life tour through Europe. He’s about to tour it for three months across Canada and Europe.
He runs the Toronto chapter of Berlin-based Flix Agency, helping organize and promote overseas tours by Canadian artists.
He just finished producing an album for Joel Thomas Hynes, with Braden Sauder at Marquee Sound. This is in addition to touring, writing and recording his roof-raising brand of folky, punky indie rock. And playing in Julie Doiron’s Julie & the Wrong Guys.
Which makes him the perfect person to offer time-management tips for creatives doing many things to survive.
1. “It’s super-important to have a private space to work out of that you can retreat to if the distractions of a public space like a café, bar or library become counterproductive.”
McGrath works best at home, in the kitchen of his Christie/Dupont apartment, which he’s turned into an office.
“I start working almost immediately after getting out of bed and slamming a cup of coffee, and work until about 7 or 8 pm and then try to get the hell out of the house to clear my head.”
It’s important to his creative process to listen back to whatever he’s working on in a different frame of mind: “walking to a show, smoking a joint, having a pint, seeing how the music interacts cinematically with the city.... I treat booking tours and working for bands as more of an office-job type thing, where once that’s done for the day, it’s really done, and I clock out.”
2. “My main thing is making sure that if something needs to be done, I do it as close to that moment as possible. I try to have the motto ‘If I don’t do it now, it’ll never get done,’ and go into a project with that approach. Operate under the assumption that your deadline is tomorrow.”
3. “Don’t take on more than what you can effectively finish on your own. It’s hard at first to say no to things, but that’s the second-best answer you can give both to yourself and others. It allows you to focus on what you’ve already committed to and gives someone ample time to find another option. It’s worse to go back on something you’ve committed to and admit defeat to yourself and others because you’ve overstretched your workload.”
4. “Have a quota of tasks for the day that you don’t stop chipping away at until they’re totally finished, and stop working for the day once those tasks are done.”
For example, he’s realized that when it comes to booking shows in different time zones, it’s diminishing returns to send emails at a time when the recipient would be asleep.
“You have to be totally committed to calling it a day when it’s time to. It’s taken me ages to realize that, but it’s an important part of being productive.”
5. “Never consider yourself an expert or guru at anything and always be open to improving and learning.”
6. “For creative work, it’s imperative to have a notebook [on you at all times]. I never tour without one, not a chance. It goes wherever I do.
“It’s also critical to be constantly listening to new music to find some kind of new source for inspiration, so I try to never ride the subway without a pair of headphones.
“People laugh about the ongoing dependence of humans on technology, but it’s critical to have a iPhone, in my opinion.... You can do everything on it, from record melodies to book shows to edit your book. I wish it weren’t so clichéd to say that.”
Berlin-Warszawa Express
Publishers Weekly. 264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p71.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
Berlin-Warszawa Express
Eamon McGrath. ECW (Legato, U.S. dist.; Jaguar, Canadian dist.), $16.95 trade paper
(112p) ISBN 978-1-77041-328-3
McGrath's debut is a tight, vulnerable, trimmed-to-the-bone experience, a fictionalized memoir that begins in 2010 as the author--a folk musician--is touring Europe alongside a ragtag group of Canadian musicians. Low on funds and even lower on morale, McGrath draws readers into his tale of drunkenness, chance encounters, long nights on the floors of airports, and surviving a skinhead club in Chemnitz thanks to the magic of Neil Young. Suffering underlies much of McGrath's story, from physical mishaps to emotional upheavals, including a reckoning with his growing reliance on alcohol to make it through each night on the road. But there's a larger question of suffering at the heart of this book: chiefly, what artists are or are not expected to give of themselves in order to "make it," and if what it takes is even worth it in the end. Readers only get brief glimpses of McGrath's life back in Canada, and his descriptions of the time between overseas tours are like the filler tracks on an album, the songs between the hits. This book isn't an album, though; it's less a narrative and more a mosaic, a playlist of moments that define a life or a story. (May)
Review: Eamon McGrath’s Berlin-Warszawa Express, Ahmad Danny Ramadan’s The Clothesline Swing and Ami Sands Brodoff’s In Many Waters
Open this photo in gallery:
JADE COLBERT
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
MAY 12, 2017
MAY 12, 2017
Berlin-Warszawa Express
By Eamon McGrath
ECW, 104 pages, $19.95
A Canadian musician finds himself strangely drawn by the siren song of post-Soviet Eastern Europe in Eamon McGrath's literary debut, a booze-sweat, punk-lyrical train ride from the Berlin Wall to points east. "Strange" because so much of this geography, outside urban centres, is in McGrath's description of a grey-concrete hellscape, decrepit in its neglect, though this depiction is in stark contrast to (some of) the people our narrator finds there. McGrath's prose is highly stylized: most of the events take place while inebriated, at night and the style is fit to match, taking on the self-aggrandizement of alcoholism. The novella is just the right length to avoid this becoming tedious. A binge can go only so long; even at this page count, there is a necessary self-critical turn during a drying-out period. What is Europe? What is it for? Berlin-Warszawa Express goes beyond literary-ruin porn: a wrestle with the European ideal from a region where it is most strikingly new.
Berlin-Warszawa Express
By Eamon McGrath
By Ian Gormely
Published May 05, 2017
Berlin-Warszawa ExpressBy Eamon McGrath
7 Suffering for ones art is a well-trodden trope. Yet punk rock troubadour Eamon McGrath manages to breath new life into the subject, as well as the most rockist of all subjects, the tour diary, in his first book, Berlin-Warszawa Express. A novella based on a composite version of his and his friends experiences traversing the wilds of Eastern Europe, guitar in hand, McGrath recounts the path that first brought him to the continent and the friends and experiences that have kept him coming back every since.
Though barely 100 pages long, McGrath imbues his tales of broken teeth, sweaty shows and drunken nights with a deeper sense of purpose than "the next show." He pulls on the histories of the Eastern European nations he visits — notably Germany and Poland — drawing parallels between artists of the past and the touring musicians of the present; he sees a straight line running through that history that has impacted the way musicians are viewed and treated in the region. Food (and drink) and lodging are de rigueur, and the relatively short distances coupled with a plethora of rail links makes touring not just viable, but enjoyable, even for a relatively unknown performer like McGrath.
At times its hard to remember that the book, written in the first person, is a work of fiction; anyone familiar with McGrath's work, or the life of your average touring musician, will immediately identify with many of the problems the protagonist encounters. Ultimately though, what comes across is that while the path McGrath — or at least the fictionalized version presented here — walks may look like suffering in the eyes of some (little financial reward, poor health, many hangovers), for others these have been enriching life experiences unobtainable anywhere else in the world.
Evocative without become overly romantic, Berlin-Warszawa Express expertly captures the life and mind-set of the starving artist, offering convincing proof that they are more fulfilled than we could ever imagine. (ECW Press)