Ben Hubbird Talks to Bry Webb

When Constantines emerged from Toronto in the mid-aughts, it signaled, in some small way, the return of brains and poetry to a testosterone-fuled heavy rock landscape. They came at precisely the right moment for a generation raised on pop-punk and hardcore, and Constantines found considerable success touring alongside similarly literate acts like the Weakerthans (both groups also shared a love of women’s curling, naming an album and a song after the sport’s championship, respectively). Constantines’ heaviness was belied by stylistic debts to artists like Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, and Tom Waits—due in part to the band’s frontman, Bry Webb. Webb’s vocals were smoky and blue collar and his lyrics often darkly sexy, strewn with cryptic references to political upheavel and new-agey ideologies. Live performances were intense, sweaty, and loud.

After a three-year musical hiatus, Webb returned sans band with a haunting and intensely personal 2011 solo album, Provider, that was reminiscent of releases from Bill Callahan and Nick Drake. Then last month—in the midst of a Constantines reunion—he released Free Will, a slightly more pop-savvy collection that’s full of gentle, meditative passages and occasional shards of biting humor. Both releases are compelling in large part for Webb’s patient, spellbinding vocal delivery.Ben Hubbird spoke to Webb just before Constantines’ first show in four years.

—Casey Jarman

I. COMING INTO THE WORLD

THE BELIEVER: So originally, with Constantines, you had this very congenial break-up. Did you feel like you had completed the thing that you set out to do?

BRY WEBB: I just think at the time it didn’t feel like we were getting any better at what we were doing—which is real harsh to say—but it just felt like we were spinning our wheels a little bit. There were a bunch of other things that I wanted to prioritize, and I think that was true for all of us. We’d been doing it for eleven years and we just started to feel like maybe there was more to life than the Constantines. When we stopped, we just sort of said, “you know, its an indefinite hiatus,” whatever that means. It was just our way of hopefully not looking like dorks when we decided we wanted to do it again. So I think we wanted to keep that possibility open, and here we are.

I don’t know if it was just feeling like “our work here is done.” It wasn’t really that definitive. It felt more like the moment you decide you need to move out of your family house, you know, your parents’ house. It was time for the next stage in my life, and for everyone that was true. And then everyone...