Halifax's Adam Baldwin Wants Better Mental Health Awareness in Canada

Photo by Jeff Cooke

Muffled through the brick and mortar of the former Stage Nine bar near Halifax’s infamous Pizza Corner, a teenaged Adam Baldwin first heard the country-rock riffs of his would-be best bud Matt Mays while waiting for some post-pub grub across the street at King of Donair. It was the year 2004, and shit was real. “I heard [Matt] playing in there from the street and thought, ‘holy shit, that sounds really cool.’ So I found out who I was hearing, then I bought their CD, and I loved that first record—I fell in love with it.” Not long after, Baldwin, who had just recently been kicked out of university, ran into Mays in Halifax around the same time that Baldwin’s then-band – Gloryhound – was headed to the East Coast Music Awards in Charlottetown. “We just kind of hit it off. It’s a small enough city that I would see him around,” Baldwin says, just as Matt Mays’ “Take It On Faith” serendipitously starts up on the speakers of the bar we’re in.

After nearly a decade as best supporting act (and friend) alongside Mays, Adam Baldwin is now making his way to centre-stage with a complete album, a small Canadian tour and some ardent analyses on mental health, federal politics and fatherhood. But also, he’s just doing what he does best – rock n’ roll. “Some songs have an important message,” Baldwin says of his first full-length record – No Telling When (Precisely Nineteen Eighty-Five). “But there’s also just like, [the type of] bone- headed rock songs that I like to hear when I’m out drinking, you know?” Appropriately, the album is gritty, good-old-fashioned rock n’ roll – woven with both beautifully complex and beautifully simple anecdotes, delivered with hoarse vibrato, bumpy beats – and a lot of harnessed heart and soul.

Not an Orwellian sequel, Baldwin says the album got its name because 1985 was the year before he was born — but also ties in themes of New York City during that time, and suggests how much little change has occurred over the span of three decades. Having released an EP a couple years ago and garnered some radio-play for “Love You With My Eyes Closed,” Baldwin says his first full-length record is long overdue. “I just want to kick it out the door, I feel like I've been sitting on it forever.” But Baldwin, who is also a father of two, says it was his kids who gave him the push he needed to go all-in with his solo career. “I wouldn't have been motivated to do it unless I had my kids. I never really cared enough about it, [then] when I had my children, I realized I had to do something in my off-time, instead of sitting around in bars all day waiting for the next tour to come along.”

The nine-track album – released last week —was recorded in just a few weeks at Toronto’s Giant Studios (owned by Metric’s Jimmy Shaw), and features the talents of Brian Murphy (Alvvays), Josh Trager (Sam Roberts Band) and Leah Fay (July Talk), among others. Though Baldwin did inherently seek inspiration for the record from his longtime musical icon, Bruce Springsteen, some tracks on the album have a much deeper narrative than your typical piano-rock ballad. “Rehtaeh” chronicles the tragic death of Rehtaeh Parsons— but more than that, it’s an outcry for both social and governmental action that Baldwin believes needs to be taken to improve the mental health industry, as well as the justice system. “It’s just having access to the proper medical health, and I mean immediately. It’s not something that can wait two months. Personally, I know, to go to see a doctor and tell them that you’re depressed and suicidal, that’s a hard enough step as is. And then to be told that there is a two month wait to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist, then that’s entirely too long.”

On “Daylight,” Baldwin plays on what could arguably be one of the least rock n’ roll topics out there – Canadian politics. Yet, he preaches a humbling homily on the stuff (“It was a 10-year winter/Falling in line/A land without freedom/Is no land of mine”). For Baldwin, though, rock n’ roll isn’t just a rhythm, a rhyme and a beat-up leather jacket — it’s an ethos. “That’s why I don't care for a lot of new rock n’ roll,” he says, sipping a Schooner, cataloguing the bar’s surroundings with concentrated eyes. “Because I think the idea of it gets confused with a certain sound that folks think they're supposed to make. But I tend to think it’s a message — or more of an idea, than a sound.”

Baldwin has been the centrepiece of one of Halifax’s most popular rock and roll staples — the Carletones, who get their namesake from their longtime venue, The Carleton Bar and Grill – for years. They’ve been playing every Saturday for five bucks a head (save the days Baldwin’s on the road), and oftentimes, are accompanied by some special guests (see: Matt Mays, Arkells, and Dan Mangan). But for Baldwin, it’s just how he makes a living. “I haven’t had a job in eight years. It would be great to buy a house and put money away for my kids’ college— all of the things that I was sort of afforded by my hardworking parents. I would just like to be little more comfortable than I am, but even that, I feel, is more than any guitar player should ask for.”

Even in the infancy of his solo career, the 29-year-old Nova Scotian seems to have the makings of a veteran. He says the notion of needing to be in a shitty place to write a good song is “a fool’s idea.” “People end up killing themselves subscribing to that. And I was sort of guilty of that at one time, but it’s rubbish. These days, I just find it’s easier to write when you don't try to. I used to sit in quiet rooms and kick my family out of the house and write songs… [but] as soon as you start to force it, you're not gonna say what you mean. So I just try to let it happen when it happens. If the kids are smashing toy cars at your feet while it happens, so be it.”

Adam Baldwin performing at the Seahorse Tavern in Halifax. Photo by Hillary Windsor.

Baldwin says he’s battled depression and suicidal thoughts—but his plea for change in the mental health industry isn’t in vain. As a father, he worries that his kids may inherit some of his darker traits. “My children are very likely to grow up with the same sort of compulsions and mental illnesses that I have, and so I want them to be able to get the help they need if they need it. I sort of had to grow up in a world where I didn't know I was depressed, because it wasn't something people talked about.” Two years ago, during Nova Scotia Music Week, Baldwin got to play the song that saved his life, with the band who wrote it. “‘Lost Together’ by Blue Rodeo. That song literally saved my life when I was a teenager, and in Truro a couple years ago, [I sang and played it with them] and I just about had an aneurysm. I was clinically depressed [when I was a teenager] but I didn't know that’s what it was. I just felt like shit and I didn't really wanna be around anyone, but I was learning to play guitar and I really felt playing guitar was this refuge from all that—and that song, I would sit in the garage and play it over and over and over again.”

A year later, at the 2015 installation of Nova Scotia Music Week, Baldwin sacrificed his cool exterior and unravelled as he spoke during a somber interview on mental health, and more specifically, the suicide of his dear friend and bandmate, Jay Smith. Just three years ago this past March while on tour in Edmonton with Mays and the band, guitarist Jay Smith took his own life after an unspoken and widely unknown battle with depression. Though, for Baldwin, hindsight is 20/20. “We all fucked up with Jay. We weren't paying close enough attention, or at least didn't know enough about what was going on with him.” Baldwin, who’d been sharing a hotel room with Smith that night, said when he woke up, he saw Smith’s shoes by the closet and just assumed he’d been out partying somewhere before heading to bed. When it came time to pack up and head to that day’s gig, the band thought nothing of Smith running late. “Jay, God love him, was scarcely ever on time,” says Baldwin. Minutes later, tragedy surfaced.

“[Our tour manager] went in the closet to get the little bag of towels and stuff that hangs up in the closet, and he found him in there.” “So he called my phone and asked for Matt, and told Matt what had happened, or what he'd discovered I guess. And I remember the words coming out of Matt’s mouth–and then it was just like I went numb for the rest of the day.” “We went back in our hotel and they put us in this conference room and the police came of course and they talked to all of us, and because I had been [sharing a room with him], they had all these questions for me, and I didn't have that many answers for them. He had been there when I went to sleep and I still didn't believe it. I had a hard time wrapping my head around it. And I remember going out for a cigarette and someone from the hotel came and said, ‘you have to get back inside, they're taking him out now,’ and they didn't want me to see them wheeling him out of the hotel.” Somehow, the band mustered up the wherewithal to play that night’s gig in Calgary, a choice that Baldwin says was the most natural way to begin to cope. “I didn't really wanna sit around a hotel and sulk about everything feeling miserable. I felt like I was around everyone I wanted to be around anyway, so we went and played a show. The feeling onstage in Calgary that night was the best thing we could’ve done—for ourselves, for Jay.” If he were still around today, Baldwin says he would heed the warning signs before it got to the point that it did. “I would tell him I love him. We’d all die to tell him that.”

Photo by Jeff Cooke

But whether it’s Jay Smith’s tragedy or Rehtaeh Parsons’, Baldwin thinks there needs to be a paradigm shift within the discourse of suicide, and how it’s reported, perceived and dealt with—not just as self-inflicted deaths, but as a deep-rooted issue that needs to be given thorough and immediate attention. “You know, if someone died by a heart attack it’s not necessarily a news story, but when somebody dies by suicide, I think it should be, because it happens more often than folks think, and so I think the families of these folks have to let the media know it’s OK to cover it as such. And maybe the more people see it, the more accustomed they’ll become to reading it, and maybe someone will be outraged by what I sort of see as an epidemic, they’ll care about enough to make some legislative changes.” Baldwin, who spoke with Parsons’ parents prior to officially committing her track to the album, says all money made off her song will go to the Rehtaeh Parsons Society —“to give them the money they need to continue their activism.”

Baldwin just finished up a quick tour in Upper Canada and will be playing a few upcoming shows — including a gig with Metric at the TD Halifax Jazz Festival in mid-July. Baldwin hopes the video for "Daylight" will make people feel something. “A song like ‘Daylight’ is sort of a condemnation of our previous government, but is also a request — a heavy-handed request — to our current government to follow through on the things we were all promised.” Until then, Baldwin will continue chasing down his own little slice of the Canadian dream—and for him, that seems to work just fine. “I’m a guy who doesn't have a job, so it would be nice to have little more security. I would like to be able to sustain [my music]. That’s all anybody should ask for if they’re in this business.”

Hillary Windsor is a writer living in Halifax. You can follow her on Twitter.