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ChartAttack Review

Umbrella Music Interview
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INDEX OF ARTICLES
Chart Attack
EXCLAIM !
GLOBE AND MAIL
THE OTTAWA CITIZEN
EYE
VUE WEEKLY
NOW MAGAZINE
The Hamilton Spectator
The Varsity
CHART MAGAZINE - NOVEMBER 2001
Superstar In Stereo
Mote Magazine
MusicEmissions.com

Chart Attack
http://www.chartattack.com/DAMN/2001/09/1101.cfm
MARTIN TIELLI
We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman (Six Shooter/Outside)

As with every Rheostatics release Martin Tielli has lent his genius to, it really comes as no surprise that his first solo album brims with the same kind of bent greatness we've come to know and love. Poppy Salesman is a mostly acoustic affair, so don't expect any of Martin's ferocious electric playing, but in the absence of electricity the 11 tracks offered throw the spotlight directly on Tielli's equally magnificent, haunting vocal abilities. Songs like the ethereal, show-stopping "Voices From The Wilderness" and "How Can You Sleep (With The Light On In Your Head)?" grab you by the heart and take you on a musical journey that only Tielli could've ever drawn the itinerary for. If this release doesn't make the country's ears perk up and give credit to one of our generation's most gifted Canadian songwriters then, sadly, nothing will. Martin has a knack for writing beautiful songs and then warping them slightly into something that may not be pop in the traditional sell-a-million-copies-for-the-man sense, but into something that seems otherworldly. Lyrically, Tielli paints aural pictures from the heart and delivers them in his trademark plaintiff vocal style < a style tough for anyone else to emulate. It's when his words are accompanied by delicate finger-picked acoustic lines like on the track "From The Reel" that you'd best have a box of tissues nearby to dry your eyes. Absolutely stunning and heartfelt songs performed in a way that makes them totally believable. And believability is a big selling point. I kinda always had the feeling he was the poppy salesman. Tim Melton (www.chartattack.com)

EXCLAIM !
MARTIN TIELLI
We Didn't Even Suspect that He Was the Poppy Salesman

Martin Tielli (Rheostatics) is a man of many musical talents. Rheos fans expecting swooping electric guitar work or grandiose operatic rock shouldn't expect more of that here. Instead, Tielli unleashes his early Bruce Cockburn influence by sitting down at the campfire and softly swooning to the stars. His first true solo album is a raw yet rich recording featuring acoustic guitar, the intimate intricacy of Tielli's compelling voice and little else, aside from a lot of cushioning reverb. This album smells like hardwood, its ambience recalling an old cabin in northern Ontario in the morning of a summer rainstorm. Tielli's ability to conjure such a mood is more instantly impressive than the songwriting itself, which reveals itself slowly. It's obvious here what exactly he brings to the Rheos, but also what exactly they bring to him ; the most direct song here is co-written with Dave Bidini. The others are often more abstact and daring, somewhere between Gordon Downie and Michelle McAdorey's recent work, all of which re-imagines Canadian folk music as a progressive and amorphous world of bleeding colours, a soundtrack to the natural psychedelia of the Northern Lights. Put on your headphones and walk through the woods. (Six Shooter/Outside)
- Michael Barclay

GLOBE AND MAIL
September 20th, 2001
NEW RELEASES
We didn't even suspect that he was the poppy salesman
Martin Tielli (Six Shooter)
Rating : ***
Reviewed by Robert Everett-Green

This is the kind of album critics call reflective, though the best parts of it scratch beneath the finished thought to expose the process of thinking itself. Some of these songs actually seem to rouse themselves from an unguarded motion of mind, the way fingers might stray across a fretboard looking for a path that hasn't yet revealed itself. You can hear an artful simulation of purposeful wandering at the start of Voices from the Wilderness, or through much of Wetbrain / Your War, in which Martin Tielli's half-sung lyric and dead-simple strumming seem so privately expressive you almost wonder whether the Rheostatic front-man is eavesdropping on himself.

But there's a force here too that's literally expressive ­ pushing out ­ and it comes from Tielli's ability to let the sound follow it's own wayward logic. His delivery is full of contrasts, both in his distressed high tenor and on his acoustic guitar. Single notes ring meaningfully out of the guitar, the voice suddenly tumbles from the brink of falsetto into a baritonal bark. The strength of his performances give some tunes a fresher appearance than they might otherwise have. But even Tielli's merely good songs reveal more depth with each listening.

THE OTTAWA CITIZEN
Saturday, September 15, 2001
We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman
Four Stars
Martin Tielli (Six Shooter)

This is the first solo album from Martin Tielli, guitarist and co-songwriter for Canadian rock icons, the Rheostatics.

Recorded live off the floor of a Hamilton studio that was once a church, it features Tielli playing acoustic guitar with hardly any other instruments. The sparse musicianship and glorious acoustics give the disc an intimate tone that compliments the material perfectly.

All the songs are written by Tielli except for Farmer in the City, a song by little-known pop existentialist Scott Walker. Tielli's songwriting ranges from poetic abstraction to pinpoint precision, as when he sings from the view of a mouse in World in a Wall. His love songs are gloomy and filled with stark, sometimes violent imagery rather than professions of endless devotion.

His singing can twist from achingly gentle to utterly wrathful in an instant. At times, Tielli sounds as though he might actually be throttling the neck of his guitar. This isn't easy listening by any means, but well worth your time.

EYE
September 13/01
BIRTH OF A SALESMAN
Rheo guitar hero Martin Tielli takes a solo acoustic odyssey ­ by Michael Barclay

If you've been part of a highly influential and unique band for your entire adult life, you'd be forgiven for being self-indulgent on your first solo album, let alone titling it We Didn't Even Suspect He Was the Poppy Salesman. But Rheostatics guitarist Martin Tielli isn't having it. In fact, he's quite self-conscious about whether he'll turn into an emotional exhibitionist.

"'O, my precious beautiful quiet self,'" he laughs. "It's so self-expository it's somehow repugnant. People forget to ask themselves, 'Why would anyone want to hear this? About how lonely I feel?' It's a fine line."

And while his own new solo songs try to veil any autobiography, there's at least one song on the album about him -- written by someone else. "How Can You Sleep?" was recorded as a Rheostatics demo 10 years ago, and the chorus was written by bandmate Dave Bidini.

"It's a song Dave wrote about me, which is a pretty ballsy thing for him to do," says Tielli. "He was basically saying, 'Why can't you relax?' The world was an upsetting place for me, and Dave was asking me, 'Why can't you function like a normal person, you freak?!' It was probably because of that that it rattled around in my head, and then I decided to make it about somebody else completely. It's a composite of a lot of things, including myself: it's about compulsive people who appear to be indestructible, and they're doing their damnedest to destroy themselves."

With a direct lyrical reference to Guided by Voices, Tielli adds that it's also about "the public's perception of public substance abusers: people flocking to shows because X band gets really tanked onstage and they want to party with the band. People are showing up to watch the train wreck, and there's nothing indicative of genius about it in any way. There are plenty of brilliant writers who are sober, but people have this teenage notion that they can't let go of."

Tielli has a different teenage notion he's been clinging to, which he's finally exorcised on Poppy. Ever since he was a teenage "folk fascist" immersed in Bruce Cockburn and Neil Young albums, he's wanted to make an all-acoustic album. It might seem unusual to a Rheostatics fan used to watching Tielli battle with his pedals to create his trademark swooping and textural electric guitar work.

"Whatever instrument I pick up, I'm going to want to do unusual things with it," says Tielli. "Part of me wishes I'd worked on acoustic guitar for another year and developed a more extensive vocabulary on it -- that would have been ideal. But at the same time I was enjoying the simplicity. It's basically a fingerpicking record. Pedals are nice, but am I considered the effects guy? I don't use that many; I don't know what people are thinking. There was a time when I'd wind them all up, but basically I use a distortion pedal, a volume pedal, a compressor, and that's it."

Poppy is a stark, naked album, featuring Tielli's voice, his acoustic guitar and little else. It's his fourth extracurricular project from the Rheos, preceded by a brief solo project during the Rheos' brief breakup in 1989, the carnivalesque collaboration Nick Buzz in 1994 and a 1998 band called Farmer in the City, which embarked on one ill-fated Western Canadian tour.

"I picked a drummer from out west that I'd never met on somebody's recommendation," Tielli recalls. "And there was a guy I'd been watching play around Parkdale for a number of years, a fusion guitarist. And there was my buddy Andrew who's not really a bassist -- I got him on bass just to see what would happen. The whole thing was a wonderful, wonderful disaster. There were personality clashes, which I'd never experienced before -- I've always got along well with people. I had to abandon the idea of a solo band for a long time, because it was pretty traumatic. But it was a good band. I listen to the tapes now that the pain has subsided, and I think it was a great spastic explosion."

Despite that experience and the solitary nature of his new material, Tielli is intent on presenting it with a band: Paul MacLeod on guitar, Greg Smith on bass and Barry Mirochnick (Veda Hille) on drums. "Even the best solo acoustic performers, I get bored with no matter what, no matter how great the songs are," says Tielli.

"I want the texture. Bruce Cockburn is like a one-man band with his guitar, but still, after an hour I want to hear something else. Having it on the record is a different listening situation. Also, I'm really into playing with other people. I don't want to be the centre of attention -- I'm chicken."

POPPY PRODUCTION

The intimacy of Poppy Salesman sounds like something Martin Tielli could have done himself on a four-track, but nonetheless he chose to call on long-time Rheostatic associate Michael Phillip Wojewoda to produce.

"I don't like twiddling knobs," Tielli explains. "And Mike is like a writing partner; he knows how to edit me immediately. His calls are freakishly uncanny. He'll suggest something and I'll fight it every time, but in retrospect it's always an amazing call -- not just, 'Oh yeah, you were probably right,' but 'Holy cow, you were so right.'"

Ten years into their working relationship, you would think Tielli would just immediately acquiesce to Wojewoda's suggestions. "Oh no, the pattern just continues!" Tielli laughs. "No learning has been achieved."

VUE WEEKLY
October 18/2001
Martin Tielli
interview by Gabino Travassos

Last October Martin Tielli spent a couple months in a post-relationship purgative writing blitz. Seventy songs later it was time to go into the studio and record these bleak odes with the sparsest arrangement. It was eleven songs of acoustic guitar and the most exhausted sounding vocals.

It's not like Martin's writing in the past ten-plus years with the Rheostatics was all that cheery to begin with. With new lines like "treasure found / treasure lost / not concerned with what it cost" the reason for putting out this solo album a month before a new Rheostatics record becomes clear: catharsis.

"It was celebratory," he says of his CD release show, "but maybe celebrating starker realities. The subject matters of the songs are serious, but I find that to be joyous. I find escapism to be somewhat depressing."

Some people might find songwriting an escape from the burden of reality, but Martin's songs are intensely personal. "It's an abstract emotional realm trying to describe things that are hopeless to describe." Since he's a full-time musician (in the Rheostatics, in Barenaked Ladies' Kevin Hearn's side project Thin Buckle, etc.) his escape from a career endlessly mining his heart for rhymes is to paint. His painting is laboriously realistic. It's an escape into the minutae of accuracy. Something he honed working at the Royal Ontario Museum as a scientific illustrator.

"They sort of fired me. I was illustrating a formal description of an extinct giant armadillo for the department of vertebrate paleontology. That meant drawing every bone in this animal's body from four or five different angles. Every scoot on its back from every angle. I wasn't fast enough. I was more interested in working on specimens, cleaning fossils. I was a bit rebellious."

When he picks up the brush it's no longer about him. "Painting to me is pure celebration of what things look like. I paint what I'm interested in. It has nothing to do with myself. Even though it's a huge effort, it gives me a very deep pleasure." And as serious as he takes his painting he's never had a show. "I usually have to sell pieces as I do them. So, I've never had a body of work. My stuff is usually pretty meticulous." Unless you're interested in album covers: "Give me an album title and I'll come up with a cover for it in two hours. I love that."

"I find the two pursuits of art and music very similar, if not the same," he says. "To actively illustrate songs gives me great ideas. It helps me a lot to sketch out a scene from the song. Maybe the next record will have a picture book with it."

The next Rheostatics record will be following the straight-ahead rock path of The Blue Hysteria. "We just happen to enjoy playing speedier numbers, and Dave and I are getting into playing really solid grooves that are inside."

Songwriting aside, The Rheostatics are something of a playground for Martin. It's a Rock band with a capital 'R', with tours, rock clubs, and blazing electric guitars. Pretty exciting stuff for an amateur paleontologist. It's a role he's comfortable with. There are forays into abstract music like the Art Gallery of Ontario-commissioned Music Inspired by the Group of 7. From his work at ROM he landed Discovery Channel soundtrack work with Tim Vesely (Rheostatics). "Tim and I would just fill up a room with toys and start recording. It just seemed to flow out like that. It was effortless."

Abstract soundtrack music seemed like an interesting sideline, but this spring he cancelled a concert he'd spent months rehearsing for. "We were going to do a cabaret by [Arnold] Schönberg, but my chronic stage fright caught up with me." The band he'd been practicing with were his musical heroes - Jon Goldsmith and Hugh Marsh of Bruce Cockburn's band, Rob Piltch of Blood, Sweat and Tears - who he'd played with before in the side-project Nick Buzz. "I had a nervous breakdown, I couldn't do it. I cancelled it the day of. I had TSO people calling me, 'We've got drugs, you know. Beta blockers. You won't feel a thing. Please do it.' I was so scared by that point I couldn't even take a pill. But we're going to record it. We're going to go to the church where I did the solo album in Hamilton and record it one day. It's totally unlike anything I thought I'd ever do."

Mental breakdowns. Binge songwriting. No wonder he pulls out his notepad and draws bones. Or devotes three months to a painting. "I think the pursuit of art is somehow higher," he says. "It's less about oneself, whereas writing music is cathartic and throwing a tantrum. It's weeping. When I'm painting things I'm just loving this thing for no reason. This thing can have nothing to do with me except it shares the same world."

NOW MAGAZINE
September 13th, 2001

TIELLI GOES STATIC FREE
By Matt Galloway

The tired excuse about doing a solo project to try things your bandmates won't let you just doesn't hold up for Martin Tielli.

The Toronto songwriter is guitarist/vocalist with the Rheostatics, the kind of group that creates everything from children's songs to ragged Crazy Horse rockers ­ not a context that's likely to cramp anyone's artistic freedom.

Still, the guitarist cranked out more than six times the necessary songs for his new solo set, We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman, in between sessions for the Rheos' Night of the Shooting Stars album due in October. What gives ?

"I had to do this," Tielli explains. "I had a songwriting pile-up over amonth and a half and realized that most of the tunes would never come to fruition if I did them with the Rheos.

"I always write, but usually very slowly. For some reason, this was effortless. The first time this happened, I was working at an all-night gas station and I'd get nine customers a night. There was nothing to do but listen to Brave New Waves and write tunes. This was kinda similar."

The feel of Poppy Salesman is completely different from that of Tielli's day job. The 11-song disc is entirely acoustic and exceedingly intimate, with tracks like hushed opener I'll Never Tear You Apart almost shocking in their starkness.

With none of the feedback and electric twang that he's known for, the only real connection between the solo set and Tielli's Rheostatics work is his elastic voice.

"This is the way I wanted to do music when I started. What made me want to play music was 60s folk music, the records my hippie uncle would give my parents."

As can be heard from his cover of Scott Walker's grim ditty Farmer In The City, it's also a very dark record.

"I find adulthood to be a very black situation," Tielli mutters. "I toyed with the idea of doing a serious album, but left that.

"The modus operandi of the Rheostatics is that you can be a complete buffoon one minute and then say something profound the next. That's what I went back to."

The Hamilton Spectator
September 13, 2001
By Glen Nott

Solo project soars to wonderful heights
Martin Tielli of the Rheostatics scores on his CD

The tiger waits
In the bushes by the lake,
But I'll never tear you apart,
With a love so pure,
Our knees will shake,
And tremble
      - I'll Never Tear You Apart,
              Martin Tielli

Every so often, one of them slips through the cracks, makes it over the wall, and ends up on the outside looking in.

It doesn't happen often and, as far as pop music goes, it doesn't happen nearly often enough. And all of that makes the release of Martin Tielli's solo debut album a special occasion far beyond a date circled on the calendar.

Enigmatic, charismatic, tragi-matic ­ Tielli had all the requistite "matics" going for him long before he stepped out of the comfotable skin of the Rheostatics to explore the relative thinness of his own membrane.

Tielli's album, We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman, is subtle and sparse and weighty and strong. All at once.

But don't dare ask Tielli himself to explain it.

"I haven't listened to it in three weeks," he says over the telephone from his home. "It's a healthy exercise."

At the worst of times, popular music is pushy marketing, demographic analysis, numbers, numbers, numbers, and winking people in shiny clothes.

At its best, though, it is this ­ finely crafted, soul-churning music and words, as carefully distilled and concentrated as Quebec's sweetest jar of maple syrup.

Poppy Salesman is a beautiful package, too, owing to the fact that Tielli, born in Italy and raised in Kitchener and Toronto, is an accomplished visual artist, as well.

Last year, his artwork on the Rheostatics' excellent children's album, The Story of Harmolodia, got Tielli a Juno nomination ­ which he should have won hands down. (Instead, a boring-as-toast package from The Tea Party won. But hey, it's the Junos ­ winking people in shiny clothes.)

The album was recorded at Hamilton's Catherine North Srudio over a period of nine days and nights in April, although it's been a year or more in the making.

The press release for Poppy Salesman tells us Tielli emerged from a serious songwriting binge armed with 70 songs, 20 of which were recorded, and 11 of which made it onto the album.

But writing binges of such heft don't just suddenly arrive by themselves, all wrapped in tidy packages complete with lyrics and titles.

No, songwriting binges are more often offshoots of some emotional tumult ­ a break-up, a breakdown, love lost, love found, and the like.

For Tielli, it was a mixed bag of misery.

"It was definitely a down year," he says, "with my fiend Kevin Hearn (Barenaked Ladies) being sick and a series of bad events through the winter. "I'd wake up and wonder 'What tragedy will befall me and my friends today ?'."

To top it all off, Tielli says his apartment nearly burned down one day, while he and the album's producer, the legendary Michael Phillip Wojewoda, were inside tooling about on songs for this album.

"He asked me if I smelled something burning, and I didn't," Tielli said, "so we just figured we'd wait and see."

Sure enough, there was a fire raging in the business just below the apartment.

"I just kept thinking 'Oh, my paintings.' Here I am barely into my careet as an artist "

Turns out the paintings were fine ­ no smoke or water damage. And Rheostatics fans would argue that Tielli has been a master artiste since helping to form the band in Etobicoke in 1980.

And there's a lot of Tielli in the Rheostatics.

The Rheos occupy a region in the domestic psyche that no other band can come close to. While The Tragically Hip get the nod from the fist-pumping set as this country's band of record, the Rheostatics, time and again, dare to fly the closest to the Canadian heart and soul.

That stance has burned a few business bridges, though, since a band that follows its muse as hardily as the Rheostatics can't be counted on to churn out hits.

"We have no relevancy with the industry whatsoever," says Tielli, as a hint of pride seeps through. "People keep asking me if I'm doing this (making a solo album) out of creative frustation.

"Really, though, they'd let me do anything. If I wanted to record one song with one word, they'd let me."

But after two months of self-imposed writing solitude, which followed a really sad winter, Tielli has produced a quiet and beautiful masterpiece that echoes ­ sometimes literally.

Tielli thanks Hamilton's Catherine North Studio for that. He was looking for a room with natural reverb, and the atmospheric converted church in the city's north end proved a perfect fit.

"Plus, the idea to get out of Toronto was important," said Tielli, who last year was voted best guitar player in a readers' poll by Now Magazine.

His quirky acoustic stylings shine through on We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman (and the tremendous bottom end in the dynamic range can bust a car speaker. Believe me, I know.)

Tielli is quoted in his press kit as saying his goal with this disc was to "make something that stands out in time", and he expanded on that theme when talk turned to today's music scene.

"I see a lot of arm-waving out there. Where is the gentle man, where is the gentle woman, where is the person willing to admit they aren't perfect ?" Check the mirror, Martin, and take a bow. Everyone else ? Just buy a disc and bathe in its beauty.

The Varsity
September 13, 2001
By Steve Collins

RHEOSTATIC TIELLI READY TO DAZZLE THE HORSESHOE
Solo effort displays musical integrity that only time can really buy
________________________________

John Coltrane's sax blared through the downtown bar, which seemed fitting, if not ironic. Streetcars roared by every few minutes. A few patrons were seated nearby, quietly eating their lunch. It was in this setting that the Varsity met with Rheostatics Martin Tielli to discuss his new solo effort, We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman.

Truly, of all the solo efforts that have been forged by men and women from exceptionally great bands, rock or otherwise, Tielli's is by far the most honest record. Contained within the eleven songs is a true representation of this man.

Tielli describes it as his most disciplined effort, as he mimes acoustic air guitar and some quiet singing, because it's just guitar and voice. He goes on to explain, "It was really hard to adhere to. It was hard just constantly hearing over-dub possibilities."

After many fabulous years with Canada's own Rheostatics, Tielli emerged from a writing binge with a vast collection of songs. It's the kind of music that I wanted to do before I got into a rock band. He confesses with a smile, "I was a teenage folkie !"

So what prevented him from crafting such a record sooner ? He playfully replies, "I got an electic guitar and I couldn't ignore it," adding a moment later, "The Rheostatics kept me incredibly busy for a long, long time."

Perhaps it was a good thing that Tielli was kept so busy, as from those years of experience and growth have sprung a maturity in his song writing that may have been absent when the initial inspirations were planted. A musical integrity that only such time can really buy.

As Tielli relates, the birth of We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman was quite spontaneous.

"(You) can't plan ... the opportunity was there ... the time was there."

The album was recorded in April 2001 with producer Michael Phillip Wojewoda, who captured Tielli's playing and voice with remarkable purity. The songs were recorded straight to analogue tape with only "micro overdubs," as Tielli calls them.

The sound flows so continually that had the liner notes not specified, one would barely notice anything added to the recording.

Aside, of course from obvious tunes like "That's How They Do It In Warsaw" and "Farmer in the City," which is the only cover song to appear on the record. "Farmer in the City" was originally recorded by Scott Walker (Tilt, 1995 Fontana Records), whose music Tielli describes as "Very abstract...very slow," emphasizing this assessment by singing a deep drawn out note or two.

Other than Scott Walker, what else influenced Tielli ? After a second's thought he begins, "Initially inspirations were people like",(pauses for a drink), "early Bruce Cockburn, Leo Kottke" (playfully repeats Leo's name again directly into the tiny cassette recorder), "Ralph Towner, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel." Even John Denver and Cat Stevens creep into the conversation, to which Martin jests, "Cat Stevens ! It's really well written stuff, but it reminds me of, like, bad TV and being like ten and really bored on Sunday afternoon, and actually sitting through some movie that didn't make sense, and it's all Cat Stevens' music !"

With We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman, where does one come up with such a title, especially when it doesn't seem to have any apparent connection to the songs ? "I'm entering it in a long album title competition," Martin says in a gravely serious voice. "Titles are a touchy thing," he continues, "it's like a frame in a story. It captures the mood of the picture," referring to his artwork which adorns the album. "Poppies represent a lot of different things, aside from the fact that I really like them. They're pretty ... a lot of them up in the mountains in Italy, where I grew up ... the Flander's type poppies, not the big, cheesy inbred poppies ... nice, small, waxy, somewhat pink poppies."

As for the songwriting process, Tielli feels that "it's impossible to sort out ... the sequence is always different. I've done it in pretty well every way. Lyrics first, music second, pulled together snippets, and inevitably at the end the song sits there, and there's just one element to figure out. It can finally come together.

Rarely there's one that just sits from top to bottom immediately, very rare. World in a Wall was sitting there for 14, 15 years. It was the hardest to write, so it's more satisfying to go, 'wow, I actually made something out of that." That would be I guess, She Said We're on Our Way Down, because it was a very complex song ... I think I managed to make it work !"

CHART MAGAZINE - NOVEMBER 2001

MARTIN TIELLI
SELLS THE POP

By Tim Melton

Martin Tielli leans in as he speaks from across the table of his favourite café like he doesn't want anyone else to hear what he's saying. It's less than a week before the release of his first solo album, We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman and he's admittedly a little bit nervous. Even though Tielli is in his mid-30s, there are still traces of the shy, sensitive teenager that was singled out and immortalized in the Rheostatics tune "Record Body Count."

Many years have passed since then, but Martin recalls that even his love of music was overshadowed by shyness early on.

"I got 42 per cent in vocal music class," he says with a quiet laugh. "The teacher had this fixation because I was shy, so she'd pick on me and single me out," he adds, before sarcastically launching into a chorus of Barry Manilow's "Mandy."

It might seem a little hard to believe, especially for those who've witnessed Tielli wailing with a voice that would cause most vocal teachers to cream their stretch pants, but luckily he has, for the most part, outgrown shyness and found a way to deal with it, especially when faced with an audience full of jocks.

"I get defiant," he explains. "I'm not going to stand up there and pretend to be a tough guy, "he continues, laughing. "When I play in front of a jock-y audience, my temptation is to behave like a flaming queen to see what I can get away with with these people. I still haven't forgotten who the enemy is !"

Which brings us to We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman - an affair essentially composed of acoustic numbers twisted around Tielli's hauntingly beautiful voice. But why the need to release a solo album now and why an acoustic one ?

"I had a plan that I never fulfilled and that was to do an album like this, but I got into The Rheostatics and other bands and I got an electric guitar...but always wanted to do it and it seemed like a nice starting point for a series of solo albums," he reveals.

Tracks like "That's How They Do It In Warsaw" (a song about Martin's neighborhood in Toronto) and "World In A Wall" ring true with Tielli's unique way of documenting the world around him. There's even a nod to a certain Toronto power-rock trio in "Voices From The Wilderness," the mention of which sends Tielli on atangent regarding the major musical influence of his youth.

"There's something very pure and uncomplicated about Rush," he says with a hint of nostalgia in his voice. "I mean, lyrically early on it was in elf-land a bit, but they're just rife with sincerity."

He continues with a smile growing on his face stating that Rush made it O.K. to sing like a high, squeaky freak.

With more musical history than you can shake a headless guitar at, Tielli must have his fair share of journals and books filled with poetry, right ?

"I have shelves of them," he says as he lights his umpteenth European cigarette. "I have no part of my life that I want to forget."

But he then recalls a momentary lapse of reason.

"I did have a period of time when I went through my journals and censored the sappy stuff," he recalls shaking his head. "I regret it because some of that was the most interesting stuff that I was fuckin' scratching out because of some weird mood I was in -that was the real juice."

Fans of the 'Statics who might worry that Tielli has enough solo material to head to the highway have nothing to fear 'cause he feels no need to fly solo permanently.

"It's [The Rheos] exceedingly open," he says, adding, "I'm not creatively frustrated in the Rheostatics at all, but I thought that by myself I'd be able to make a piece that had a singular overall feeling, whereas all Rheostatics albums are going to be eclectic affairs."

Tielli, who is anything but a sports fan, sees the 'Statics as his gang. It's the closest thing I've ever gotten to the feeling of camaraderie that you get from playing on a team," he says thoughtfully.

With that said, the conversation drifts to progressive rock, jazz guitarist Bill Frissell and Northern Ontario until, all of a sudden, Tielli looks up to see his girlfriend standing at the table with arms crossed, informing him that she's been starving awaiting his return for dinner. Tielli laughs, packs up his drawing supplies and books, pays his bill and ends the interview with these immortal words :" ...And you got to see me get in shit by my girlfriend !"

Superstar In Stereo

MARTIN TIELLI - WE DIDN'T EVEN SUSPECT THAT HE WAS THE POPPY SALESMAN
(Sixshooter Records)

MARTIN TIELLI stood next to me on an escalator at the mall yesterday. I carefully looked him over to ensure that my eyes were not deceiving me and that I wasn't just imagining that one of the most talented musicians in Canada was right before me. As I surreptitiously looked him up and down, I silently ran through all words of praise that I wanted to lavish upon him. I thought that perhaps I would tell him that his band, RHEOSTATICS, was one of the most underrated but brilliant bands I had ever heard. I considered telling him that his solo record WE DIDN'T EVEN SUSPECT THAT HE WAS THE POPPY SALESMAN was utterly fantastic.

Should this man happen to be MARTIN, perhaps I could ask him why he decided to branch away from the band for a solo stint. Was he feeling unfulfilled in the band or was it simply a case of needing an outlet for the extraordinary overabundance of songs that TIELLI is legendary for? I wanted to know how he was able to wade through the 80 songs that he wrote for this record, in order to chose the 11 gorgeous songs which comprise POPPY SALESMAN.

If that man next to me really was MARTIN TIELLI, I hoped that my smile conveyed my appreciation of his extraordinary craftsmanship. I hoped that it told him how the sparse, acoustic, stripped down sound of the album was the most perfect contrast to his rock roots in RHEOSTATICS. Maybe the twinkle in my eye would let him know that "That's How They Do It In Warsaw" is all at once hilarious, poppy (no pun intended), and downright infectious. If he was indeed MARTIN TIELLI I wanted to tell him that his solo record was a delight from start to finish. That the aching "I'll Never Tear You Apart" was moving beyond belief with its acoustic glory and his insanely beautiful vocal delivery. I thought I'd stop him and say, "Martin, your craftsmanship is impeccable. Your songs are so honest, so poignant, such a rare treat. Your music is good and true and soaring and crazy and magnificent. WE DIDN'T EVEN SUSPECT THAT HE WAS THE POPPY SALESMAN is one of the best records I've heard this year."

There were so many things that I wanted to say to the man next to me. The man wearing the blue corduroy suit with that trademark hat titled to the side. The man with the battered duffel bag that bore the name M. Tielli on it's side. It was him. It was him all right. But when I realized that, I was struck mute. I couldn't say a word. So I gave him a bashful smile as he glanced my way. As we parted at the top of the escalator I hoped that he knew exactly what I meant. Laura Quartarone

Mote

Martin Tielli Interview with Gabino Travassos

Last October Martin Tielli spent a couple months in a post-relationship purgative writing blitz. Seventy songs later it was time to go into the studio and record these bleak odes with the sparsest arrangement. It was eleven songs of acoustic guitar and the most exhausted sounding vocals.

It’s not like Martin’s writing in the past ten-plus years with the Rheostatics was all that cheery to begin with. With new lines like “treasure found / treasure lost / not concerned with what it cost” the reason for putting out this solo album a month before a new Rheostatics record becomes clear: catharsis.

“It was celebratory,” he says of his CD release show, “but maybe celebrating starker realities. The subject matters of the songs are serious, but I find that to be joyous. I find escapism to be somewhat depressing.”

Some people might find songwriting an escape from the burden of reality, but Martin’s songs are intensely personal. It’s an abstract emotional realm trying to describe things that are hopeless to describe. Since he’s a full-time musician (in the Rheostatics, in Barenaked Ladies’ Kevin Hearn’s side project Thin Buckle, etc.) his escape from a career endlessly mining his heart for rhymes is to paint. His painting is laboriously realistic. It’s an escape into the minutae of accuracy. Something he honed working at the Royal Ontario Museum as a scientific illustrator.

“They sort of fired me. I was illustrating a formal description of an extinct giant armadillo for the department of vertebrate paleontology. That meant drawing every bone in this animal's body from four or five different angles. Every scoot on its back from every angle. I wasn't fast enough. I was more interested in working on specimens, cleaning fossils. I was a bit rebellious.”

When he picks up the brush it’s no longer about him. “Painting to me is pure celebration of what things look like. I paint what I'm interested in. It has nothing to do with myself. Even though it's a huge effort, it gives me a very deep pleasure. And as serious as he takes his painting he’s never had a show. “I usually have to sell pieces as I do them. So, I've never had a body of work. My stuff is usually pretty meticulous. Unless you’re interested in album covers: Give me an album title and I'll come up with a cover for it in two hours. I love that.”

“I find the two pursuits of art and music very similar, if not the same,” he says. “To actively illustrate songs gives me great ideas. It helps me a lot to sketch out a scene from the song. Maybe the next record will have a picture book with it.”

The next Rheostatics record will be following the straight-ahead rock path of The Blue Hysteria. “We just happen to enjoy playing speedier numbers, and Dave and I are getting into playing really solid grooves that are inside.”

Songwriting aside, The Rheostatics are something of a playground for Martin. It’s a Rock band with a capital “R”, with tours, rock clubs, and blazing electric guitars. Pretty exciting stuff for an amateur paleontologist. It’s a role he’s comfortable with. There are forays into abstract music like the Art Gallery of Ontario-commissioned Music Inspired by the Group of 7. From his work at ROM he landed Discovery Channel soundtrack work with Tim Vesely (Rheostatics). “Tim and I would just fill up a room with toys and start recording. It just seemed to flow out like that. It was effortless.”

Abstract soundtrack music seemed like an interesting sideline, but this spring he cancelled a concert he’d spent months rehearsing for. “We were going to do a cabaret by [Arnold] Schonberg, but my chronic stage fright caught up with me.” The band he’d been practicing with were his musical heroes - Jon Goldsmith and Hugh Marsh of Bruce Cockburn’s band, Rob Piltch of Blood, Sweat and Tears - who he’d played with before in the side-project Nick Buzz. “I had a nervous breakdown, I couldn't do it. I cancelled it the day of. I had TSO people calling me, ‘We’ve got drugs, you know. Beta blockers. You won't feel a thing. Please do it.’ I was so scared by that point I couldn't even take a pill. But we're going to record it. We're going to go to the church where I did the solo album in Hamilton and record it one day. It’s totally unlike anything I thought I'd ever do.”

Mental breakdowns. Binge songwriting. No wonder he pulls out his notepad and draws bones. Or devotes three months to a painting. “I think the pursuit of art is somehow higher,” he says. “It's less about oneself, whereas writing music is cathartic and throwing a tantrum. It's weeping. When I'm painting things I'm just loving this thing for no reason. This thing can have nothing to do with me except it shares the same world.”

www.musicemissions.com

Martin Tielli - We Didn’t Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman

Martin Tielli has unleashed his long overdue debut solo album We didn't even suspect that he was the poppy salesman (henceforth referred to as Poppy Salesman). Any Canadian interested inunderground music will know Martin from his day job as the front-man for the Rheostatics, Canada's critically acclaimed national treasure. Tielli holed up himself up earlier this year and went on a writing binge. The result was 70 new songs, 20 of which are represented here in their glory. Some may think Tielli is a bit "out there" but all geniuses are known as being on the edge. Poppy Salesman was an outlet for Tielli to unleash some of his pent up ideas beforegoing back to writing for the Rheostatics. The songs on Poppy Salesman were recordedlive with a minimum of overdubs and for the most part consist just of Martin and his amazing guitar playing. It is impossible to pick a favorite track as they all have a certain charm to them. Don't expect to understand the songs: they are all a bit obscure but very well crafted. Poppy Salesman is a great glimpse into the head of Martin Tielli. For other Martin craftedmasterpieces see the art on his website.