Head Full Of Wonder Jason Collett

• 1Dark Times02:45
• 2Everyday Sunflower02:50
• 3Milk & Honey02:11
• 4Just Before The Rain02:18
• 5Hot Mess02:30
• 6Have Some Fun02:19
• 7Silver Dollar Moon03:08
• 8Right On Woman02:42
• 9Closer To The Truth03:42
• 10Come On Sun02:51
• 11Up The River02:10
• 12Sweet Water Sea03:23
• Total Runtime32:49

Info for Head Full Of Wonder

For Head Full Of Wonder, Collett takes inspiration from a famed Bertolt Brecht epigram on the first single: ‘In the dark times / will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing / about the dark times.’ With the antidote to the din of the days, Collett layers breezy, jangly melodies over his own patent prose, answering yes ‘you can really get that feel in dark times.’ The first salvo from Head Full Of Wonder is folk music distinctly of the moment, lifted up by the spirit of music itself.

"I read those lines from Brecht's 1938 poem and immediately heard a melody, and the song came together without effort," Collett recalls. "The recording was similar, it came together pretty naturally in a live take."

Head Full Of Wonder finds Collett stepping out of his usual creative orbit, recording in Toronto at All Day Coconut with Montreal producer Marcus Paquin, joined by drummer Liam O'Neill (SUUNS), guitarist Joe Grass, and bassist Mike O'Brien (Zeus). A distillation of the five years since 2016’s Song And Dance Man, these eleven new songs hone in on the fine craft of songwriting, offering a direct and simple collection of elegant indie folk, some of the most poignant creations of Collett's storied catalog.

"In absorbing the tumult of the times, there's a lot of shit to write through, (that Bruce Cockburn line comes to mind, ‘you've got to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight’) and the challenge is to get to the other side with something positive to contribute," Collett says. "I let go of some swagger and embraced intimacy and joy and wonder. I hear this in the record and it makes me very happy to have made it.”

Jason Collett

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 48 kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96 kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Jason Collett
Song And Dance Man’s thirteen songs bear the wit and melody of classic Jason Collett: contemplative reflections on getting older, backed with an affinity for freewheeling 70s dance music. The album’s conspiring themes of love & loneliness, sun & shadows, are buoyed by its soaring sound. Each song rises into an easy, spacious groove, lead by Jason’s languid melodies and Afie’s sun-drunk bass.

“There’s a cool economy to Afie’s approach that lets the record breathe and allows it to say more with less, something I worked hard at hardly working at in writing strolling the songs,” says Collett. “Keeping a light touch, keeping it short.”

Having spent the years since 2012’s Reckon finding himself further engaged in the growing success of his Basement Revue concert series – a cross-pollinating musical & literary mash-up of Canada’s premiere contemporary artists – the Toronto indie-troubadour describes this record as a liberating process distilled in long stretch of domestic reverie.

“I like writing songs and for the first time in my life I felt no rush to hustle them or myself out the door,” says Collett. “I let some dust settle, some weeds grow, puttered about at home…”

The result is a dynamic addition to a strong body of work. Song And Dance Man may be Jason Collett’s finest effort yet – back in the spotlight, more comfortable than ever in the guise of entertainer:

You got to do what you can when you’re a Song And Dance Man.

Song And Dance Man was recorded in spring 2015 with long-time collaborators drummer/engineer Don Kerr (at his Rooster Studio), Christine Bougie on guitar & lap steel, Zeus’ Neil Quinn on backing vocals, and Afie holding it down on the bass, sometimes two.

This album contains no booklet.