For over 35 years, Jim Cuddy has written songs that have become indelible in the soundtrack of Canadian lives.  With the release of his fourth solo album, Constellation, he adds ten songs to that extraordinary songbook.

As one of the founding members and creative forces behind Blue Rodeo, Cuddy has received nearly every accolade Canada can bestow upon a musician, from the Order of Canada and induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, to countless JUNO Awards and a Star on Canada’s Walk of Fame. Behind it all is a simple devotion to his craft as a songwriter, which remains Cuddy’s tireless pursuit after more than three decades.

As is the case with all great songwriters, Cuddy’s music has taken on deeper meaning with the passage of time, no small feat considering he has penned some of the most memorable songs in our nation’s canon.  What comes across on Constellation is less of a separation between the bitter and the sweet, as is sometimes evident with Blue Rodeo, but rather an emotional honesty that resonates across the album. 

 “’Constellations’ is about a friend of mine who passed away last year.  Some friends and I took him up to my farm and we sort of had our last supper. We had a riotous time, we drank a lot of wine, and we had a lot of laughs, and it was all tempered with the fact that we knew that our friend was not going to survive this illness. I think all the songs on the album were tempered by that because there’s something very sobering about losing a friend, especially losing a friend that’s younger, because it makes you tally up mortality a bit.  What it made me do on this record is write some more definitive truths for myself. Write things that had wounded me. Write things that I loved and held onto and write about things I had lost,” says Jim Cuddy.

Special guests: Devin Cuddy, Sam Polley and Barney Bentall

Run time: 2 hours 40 minutes, includes opener Barney Bentall and intermission