“Dog Weather is the next great novel of my generation.”
– Paul Henderson, Chairman of the Board
Dog Weather is the new album from Baby Eagle and the latest release from You’ve Changed Records, a small Canadian label steadily building a reputation for the collaborative nature of it’s roster and the high quality of it’s product. YC co-owner and Baby Eagle songwriter Steven Lambke (Constantines) is back with a rock band featuring lablemate/co-owner Daniel Romano (Attack in Black), Shotgun Jimmie, and David Trenaman and Colleen Collins (Construction & Destruction).
The story of this record isn’t all that different from a thousand others out here. Songwriter forms a scrappy band of talented friends when their schedules allow. At the tail end of winter the aforementioned band heads to a big rural house overlooking a vast body of water. Wood is burned, dogs shit, wind howls. Meals are cooked and people sing, play instruments, and a record gets cut. Serendipity trumps bad luck.
What is different on this record, is the way its stories are told, what they describe, and the undeniable joy with which they’re played. It is a record full of natural imagery, domestic narratives and ragged characters trying to patch a wound of meaning on the world. This is a rock band shaking its wet fur dry, pulling its boot from the mud and driving another mile.
Dog Weather is the third record from Baby Eagle, and its very much of its time. Its characters standing on the other side of some fast and reckless youth, some shitty day jobs, a little scarred but settled, holding very little, outside enough love to matter. Guitars come and go like flyweights in a barnfight, the drummer is a steady, smiling underdog. “What the hell did you expect from us? What more do you want?”
Biography in the First Person:
Baby Eagle is the songs of Steven Lambke, that’s me. We discourage the term solo project and are happy in collaboration. This is something we have to do together! We, slippery devils and shadow lurkers, are not easily photographed or described. When pressed to settle upon a description we say “garage folk”. One imagines both the dusty uncovered stage in a distant corner of the folk festival, listed somewhere down the bill, misspelled, and the beer can littered basement of the punk rock show where the words are lost but the spirit remains, encoded in the noise and the having been there. We say roots, and include the protest song, the beat, and the all-ages show. (We avoid all reference to the cultural toxic of classic rock radio but are sure it remains, somewhere. That’s okay, we like that Neil Young/Bob Dylan/John Lennon song).
Steve Lambke has been in Constantines, Daniel Romano has been in Attack in Black and Daniel, Fred, and Julie, Shotgun Jimmie is Shotgun Jimmie, David Trenaman and Colleen Collins are Construction and Destruction. Together, for 3 days in January, in a house in Port Greville, NS called the Quarantine, we were Baby Eagle, one and all.
Steven Lambke and Daniel Romano are the owner/operators of You’ve Changed Records.
Dog Weather is broken bones, the public radio, the long road, the grown tall and gone to seed, the wind whistling on the lip of a bottle, the monkey in your dreams, and the two between the sheets. Dog Weather is the here and now. There ain’t no road sign at the corner, kid. You just have to know the way.