WHOSE LINE IS IT ANYWAY?

As melodic and lyrically masterful as ever, Ron Sexsmith mines the past on a potent new album, The Vivian Line, inspired by leaving the big city for more humble surroundings. But is he, as longtime cheerleader Elvis Costello once suggested, still “cursed” by being born out of time? Terry Staunton takes a road trip to find out.

- Terry Staunton

The Vivian Line is a stretch of highway running between the modest Canadian town of Stratford and the significantly busier Toronto, 90 miles to the east. Named, informally, after a local pioneer, the region’s first female school bus driver, it also serves as a jumping-off point for one of the country’s most eloquent songwriters to ponder his own history.

Ron Sexsmith was born and raised in another part of Ontario province, nearer the border with the USA, but has called Stratford home for the last few years and was struck by the area’s parallels to where he lay his childhood head. “Me and my wife moved out here because, frankly, we couldn’t afford the kind of house we wanted in Toronto but needed to still be relatively close to the city,” he explains. “It’s sort of semi-rural, a population of about 30,000 compared to Toronto’s three million, and seems convivial to what I do. I wrote my last album [2020’s Hermitage] here, and I also finished a musical, but this is the first one where the memories came flooding out.

“I would walk along the river every day and when I got home, I’d have all these songs in my head,” he continues. “Almost without me thinking about it, the road came to represent a portal from my old life to my new life. That opened a whole can of worms.”

Those worms manifest themselves in pockets of the singer’s 14th full album, so it’s natural he should name it The Vivian Line. Fans can rest assured the record ticks the requisite Sexsmith boxes of brain-lodging, persuasive melodies and selfharmonies in an Americana vein that intermittently ventures towards power pop, adorned by imagery-laden lyrical portraits of everyday people. The chief difference is how often the new songs refer directly to their maker.