Short Story Writer Branches Out with Bio of Local Musician
Jim Guthrie: Who Needs What, Andrew Hood’s new biography of a game-changing Guelph singer-songwriter, is a fun and foulmouthed portrait of an artist, a community, and a period of huge transition for the music industry. Stained with feces and doused in gasoline, it’s as touching, liberating, and irreverent as the music it chronicles, and it’s a serious oral history to boot, drawing on extensive interviews with Guthrie and his contemporaries. After releasing his 2003 album Now, More Than Ever, Guthrie struggled with writer’s block and eventually moved into composing for movies and advertisements, striking gold with the catchy “Hands in My Pocket” jingle for Capital One. Andrew Hood’s other books are the short story collections The Cloaca and Pardon Our Monsters. I spoke to Andrew in early March.
Will Wellington: Your fiction is often about characters who are disillusioned, upset, and bitter. But that’s not necessarily reflective of you as a person.
Andrew Hood: Well, for the most part it is. But I guess I never thought of that as a bad thing. My favourite thing to hear about a person is the thing they’re worst at or the thing they’re most embarrassed about or the things they struggle with, because I feel that’s what everybody has in common. You present yourself as a functional person, but I sort of assume, and for the most part get confirmation, that most people are terrified to be alive.
…a fun and foulmouthed portrait of an artist, a community, and a period of huge transition.
W.W.: Is this why you’re so interested in blood and shit in your writing?
A.H.: I think for the most part, but the other part too is that it’s just funny.
W.W.: Of course, Jim Guthrie signs his letters “poopy pants.”
A.H.: He did in the past. As I was starting to talk to him, he would sign off, “Ok, I’ve got to go poop now.” That honesty is remarkable to me. It’s weird to me that people are that open with their lives. That’s something I’ve never been able to do.
W.W.: The book’s about Jim, but it’s also about taste, economics, and whole Canadian music scenes coming and going. Was that the initial vision or concept?
A.H.: I basically wanted to look at 20 years of music and technology and economics with Jim Guthrie as a lens. There is no central character. All of these scenes are built out of relationships and chance. The idea was to make this family tree and, when I realized I didn’t have 500 pages, I thought I should probably zero-in on Jim a little more. Jim was like Forrest Gump. He seemed to be in the right place at the right time.
W.W.: Has your research into Jim Guthrie’s career prompted any reflection on your own career as a writer?
A.H.: Yeah, it became a weird self-help book halfway through. In some ways, it feels like writing this book is the equivalent of writing a song for a commercial. I mean, it’s something that I put a lot of time and a lot of myself into, but it’s something made for mass consumption. I think what I found really freeing looking into his career is how easy it is to get pigeonholed, especially when you are successful or well received early on, which I was to a certain extent. It’s easy to think, “Ok, this is what people like and so this is what I’ll continue doing.” You forget that that’s not the point.