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Murray McLauchlan brings his Canadian songbook to Red Deer

The iconic musician performs Oct. 27 at the Memorial Centre
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Canadian singer/songwriter Murray McLauchlan. (Contributed photo.)

The older you get, the more everything seems marketed to young people, says Canadian musician Murray McLauchlan, who turned 70 in June.

The creator of The Farmer’s Song and Whispering Rain isn’t grumbling, just observing. But he doesn’t see anything positive coming out of causing a “division” between generations.

“It closes young people off from these really significant cultural artifacts that come before them,” said the iconic musician, who performs Oct. 27 at Red Deer’s Memorial Centre.

His answer is to “break down the silo for everybody,” something he attempts to do with his new album, Love Can’t Tell Time.

It’s made up of some standards (Come Fly With Me, Pick Yourself Up, Hey There) and a bunch of originals that McLauchlan wrote or co-wrote with the aim of capturing the same timeless qualities in music and lyrics.

The Scottish-born, Toronto-raised singer joked, “there’s absolutely no age requirement” for listening to his new album — just like there was no age limit on learning how to play its jazzy arrangements.

While the guitarist performed straight-up country-folk-roots music for most of his 45-year career, he put a new style of guitar picking to work on Love Can’t Tell Time.

Playing “shell voicing ” is like learning a new guitar language, he said. It allowed him to use different parts of the fret board to create the “complex modulations” needed for tunes such as Hey There and his original, The Second Half of Life.

McLauchlan is used to stretching his creativity — he’s also a painter, author, actor and radio host who was appointed to the Order of Canada.

“The trick to being an artist is learning how to see,” he recalled his mentor, the late painter Doris McCarthy, once telling him. And the same holds true for songwriting, he said.

“You have to be a keen observer of life — and to be able to get yourself out of the way,” so personal bias doesn’t taint the view.

While the musician performed in New York most poignantly in 2001, two weeks after the Twin Towers were destroyed by terrorists, he doesn’t feel politically welcome there in these Trumpian days. He laments, “It’s awful to see the path that has been taken since….”

But Canada, with its vast rural and urban spaces, has always informed his music — such as The Farmer’s Song, which still regularly garners McLauchlan outpourings of fan appreciation. He believes there’s something unique about the tunes played by Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, Ian Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot and himself.

McLauchlan likes to quote a Japanese student who once told him, “it’s like there’s a wind that blows through it.”