John Powers releases New Orleans-inspired 'Everyone's a Critic'

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

Goderich’s John Powers, a musician well known throughout Huron County, has released his new album, Everyone’s a Critic, the first child of a year-long songwriting challenge that he hopes will lead to more albums in the years to come.

 

Across 10 songs, Powers evokes a strong New Orleans influence that brings to mind the great Dr. John with its upbeat, fun piano, courtesy of a new collaborator: Jesse Whiteley. Powers connected with Whiteley through a mutual friend Blyth Festival fans may know, Raoul Bhaneja, and once they began working together, the album began to take shape. 

 

The pair worked with Powers’ traditional line-up of musicians, which includes Graham Hargrove on drums, and was able to put the album together remotely, with everyone recording their own parts in their home studios and Powers putting it together. In fact, this is Powers’ first full album that he’s produced entirely by himself.

 

In addition to his regular collaborators, Powers also turned to family to help him out with this one. His wife, Melina, provided backing vocals where needed and some of their children even lent their voices to the album’s opening track: “Something Great”.
The work on this album, he said in an interview with The Citizen, really began with a songwriting challenge that he took on. First he wanted to see how long it would take him to write 100 songs. Then, when he reached 100, he wanted to see how many songs he could write in a year. (The answer was 265.) He’s since kept going, surpassing 300 songs on this journey, showing no signs of slowing down. (As a teacher in Hensall who lives in Goderich with a busy life full of children and bands, Powers says he writes many of his songs through dictation on his drives to and from work.)

 

When Powers decided that he wanted to record some of the songs he wrote, he eventually connected with Whiteley and the piano he provided for the first song really opened up the rest of the album and that’s when the vision of a jazzy, bluesy, fun New Orleans-inspired album began to come clear in his mind.

 

The whole project began to take shape and, as he worked to put it together, Powers was really happy with what he had. Even now, as a perfectionist, he’s listened to the album many, many times and he’s happy with what he and his fellow musicians have created.

 

He also says that having his children, including his five-year-old daughter, on the album provides a snapshot in time that he’ll have forever. While he hopes that listeners will enjoy the album, he admits that that is a bit of a time capsule just for him.

 

As for the future, Powers hopes to play a pair of concerts over a weekend to help promote the album and reach new listeners, perhaps with one show in Goderich and a second in Stratford. The catch will be assembling his band and ensuring that everyone can be together in one spot for the shows, however, he’s hopeful that it will happen sometime this spring.

 

Looking ahead even further, he hopes that this will be just the first of a number of albums that focus on a specific style of music. 
Over the course of his career, Powers has written and performed songs across many genres. He hopes that, after making this New Orleans-inspired album, he’ll be able to gather songs for, say, a country album, a rock album, a folk album and more. He hopes that Everyone’s a Critic is just the top of the iceberg.

 

While Everyone’s a Critic won’t be released in a physical format - at least for the time being - it is now streaming on most platforms, as well as YouTube.