Better late than never

It’s almost as if we’re a bit suspicious of all the recommendations, as if we wonder whether his songs might not be too good for the likes of us. Oh, songwriters get them, sure, but they’ve been specially trained or something. What if Sexsmith’s songs just go way over our heads? Perhaps we’d better not listen to them. We don’t want to embarrass ourselves by not liking what all those clever people like.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Sexsmith’s songs are straightforward, amazingly melodic pop. One listen and you’re hooked. And finally, with his 10th studio album — the none more aptly titled Long Player Late Bloomer — people are getting the chance to listen to Sexsmith, and they are indeed being hooked.

The album went into the charts last week at No 48. I know, it doesn’t seem that impressive, but this is the first time he’s ever had a record in the Top 50, and at the time of writing the album is moving up the charts in the midweeks. Last Friday, when BBC4 ran a documentary, Love Shines, on Sexsmith, the album jumped straight up to No 4 on the iTunes chart and No 1 on the Amazon indie chart during transmission, proving that, as soon as you hear some of Sexsmith’s songs, you want to hear more.

He soon realised that though he’d amassed some excellent songs, he was wary about recording again As I write this, Long Player Late Bloomer is still at the top of the Amazon indie chart and at No 9 overall — comfortably ahead of Rumer, PJ Harvey, Beady Eye and Radiohead. The first single from the album, Believe It When I See It, is playlisted on Radio 2. Sixteen years after his major-label debut, Sexsmith finally has that elusive thing: momentum. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s even more remarkable because it comes only a couple of years after his career hit an all-time low. Touring his last album, Exit Strategy of the Soul, the years of failure to break through from his cult status finally got to Sexsmith. “I couldn’t see the point of making any more records,” he says now. “What little self-confidence I had was all gone. I thought I might as well give up.”

When he and his wife, Colleen Hixenbaugh, went on holiday in New Mexico, however, she rented her husband a guitar and he found himself writing again. “I didn’t take my own guitar, I had no plans to write anything, but I just fell in love with the guitar Colleen got me, and I found that, with nothing else much to do, I’d just go for a walk every morning, and by the time I got back to the house, I’d written a song.”

He soon realised that though he’d amassed some excellent songs, he was wary about recording again. He didn’t want to make yet another album that was rapturously received by the critics and his peers, but not bought by many other people. He was fed up with being a cult artist. “All the people I admired when I was growing up, they were album artists, but they also had big hit records,” Sexsmith explains. “People like Elton John and Joni Mitchell.”

Sexsmith’s work harks back to the classic singer-songwriter values of the 1970s. (“I think that’s why all the older guys like me,” he quips, a typically self-deprecating acknowledgment of his prestigious fan base.) If he’d been around back then, he would surely have sold millions. Instead, he’s working in an industry where acclaimed album artists are virtually a different species from the hit-makers who populate the singles chart; and the same songwriting skills that once guaranteed success seem to consign artists to a niche audience.

At a low point Sexsmith was encouraged by his wife to continue writing (Rasmus Lindgren)

Sexsmith wanted to break out of this, and he knew he would have to find a producer who could make his music work on the radio. “I live in Toronto, and I hang out in the indie scene there, and the other musicians were saying, ‘Oh, you should get Nigel Godrich [Radiohead’s producer] or someone like that’ — but that wasn’t what I was looking for.”

We may never know exactly what Sexsmith was looking for, because he ended up with someone that neither he nor anyone else could possibly have predicted: Bob Rock, the man who helmed Metallica’s Black Album. Sexsmith met Rock at a party following the Junos, Canada’s music-industry awards. “I thought he would know who was out there, so I asked him if he knew any producers I could work with, and he said, ‘How about me? I’m a fan.’”

Sexsmith dismissed the idea as ridiculous, for three good reasons: Rock was a heavy-metal producer; Rock was way out of his financial league; and Sexsmith’s natural lack of self-confidence meant he assumed Rock’s claim to be a fan was just industry schmoozing. One by one, though, these objections were shot down.

First, later that evening, at the same party, Sexsmith met the MOR star Michael Bublé, who said that Rock had just produced his last album. Clearly, he was not a man who could be pigeonholed. So Sexsmith sent him some demos and Rock replied immediately: he loved the songs, he wanted to produce the album; and, as for the money thing... “Bob just went out of his way to make things work,” Sexsmith says. “He took no money up front. We’re still paying him now!”

The combination of Sexsmith’s songs and Rock’s production works perfectly. Rock makes sure every song cuts to the chase, and brings out the irresistible pop hooks that have always been there in Sexsmith’s songs, but have sometimes taken a few listens to reveal themselves. On Long Player Late Bloomer, every song grabs you immediately.

As the album progresses, the (lyrical) mood lightens. The pivotal song is Michael and His Dad This is all the more remarkable because many of these songs address the crisis of confidence that their writer was undergoing. “Whatever I do, I’m doing it wrong”, Sexsmith sings on Get in Line. “You could say it was time for a wake-up call/But I never did get that call,” he adds on No Help at All. Yet the no-holds-barred examination of his state of mind that occupies the first half of the album comes clothed in bright, sparky and eminently playlistable guitar pop that led one executive at his record company to suggest to Sexsmith that this was the happiest album he’d ever made. “I thought, ‘I must get this guy a lyric sheet,’” he laughs. “But, you know, I’ve always loved bands like the Kinks, where you would get these melancholy lyrics, but the music was really up. I like that combination.”

As the album progresses, the (lyrical) mood lightens. The pivotal song is Michael and His Dad, a story song drawn from Sexsmith’s own life, before he made his first album. “I was looking for work, so I’d sit in cafes reading the job ads, and my son Christopher would have to sit there, bored out of his mind,” he explains. The song manages to be both grim and uplifting at the same time, and — buoyed by an unforgettable six-note piano riff and the line “It takes much more than love” — it allows the light into the album, which then proceeds with a series of love songs, giving the listener a satisfying emotional journey. This narrative arc confirms Sexsmith’s claim — in Believe It When I See It — that “This ain’t no random shuffle/There’s reason in these rhymes”.

In the title track, he sets out the manifesto for the album: “I’m a small player/With a tall order/To come out on top/And without selling my soul/That every­one might know/That I’m a late bloomer.” When he wrote those lines, not long after considering quitting, it must have seemed a very tall order indeed. Now, with the album in the charts, a single on the radio and several other contenders ready to follow, it’s looking more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The album Long Player Late Bloomer and the single Believe It When I See It are out now on Cooking Vinyl; Sexsmith plays the Barbican, EC2, on April 30