![]() Just like the Wagnerian dramas sung loud and long. Read into this as you may, but perhaps this is an operatic zeitgeist populated by cartoonish caricatures living in an arcade game where realities and fantasies merge to become a storyline that is equal parts imaginary and real. “I’ve never felt so good and I’m happier than I’ve ever been. “I’m in the best shape I’ve been in my life. I started working out like a beast, watching what I would eat, doing cardio and weights and now I feel younger. For years I was a dead man walking when I hit a certain age and I’ve learned to take care of myself. He rises, he falls, he hits rock bottom and then he is able to find redemption. (The protagonist) has redemption at the end. How you get caught up in it, but I also put in lightning, darkness, maidens and in the end, it gets more spiritual. ![]() "(Eddie Gage) is a guy that I guess is sort of my alter-ego or a younger alter-ego I might once have had. It just popped into my mind," he tells me. His words flow in torrents.Īn obvious question is what's behind the title of his album. Over the course of the next 24 minutes, he responds to questions like a river during monsoon season. It was time to concentrate on me and work on songs that would appear under my name. “It was a conscious decision not to work with any more artists or write songs for anyone but myself. “In '08 I decided to stop working with just about everybody,” he tells me from his comfortably spacious residence in suburban Montreal that contains multiple studio spaces, musical instruments, consoles, speakers and digital gear. What he needed was a break from the factory cycle of creating hits and a more expansive canvas that would enable him to work unrestricted on a body of work that would be his Volta della Cappella Sistina, with him playing the part of Michelangelo. There’s a romanticism that lurks inside him that isn’t always obvious in his dealings with people, and a series of personal mishaps put him on the edge and made him known as a difficult card to deal with as the years piled on. His ability to multi-task and obsessively focus on the minutest detail earned him a reputation as a go-to guy when the chips were down and a hit was needed. His fluency in conversational French, English, and Italian successfully allowed him to work with artists from the Americas and Europe. He racked up an enviable track record and collected Grammy awards with Dion and La Ley with whom he wrote, arranged and produced for at some stage in their careers. It was one of several fortuitous connections he made along the yellow brick road that has helped make him millions and, for a time, pushed him to the top of the ‘A’ list of songwriters, arrangers, musicians and producers for hire.įrom the mid-'80s through to 2012, his credit appears as arranger, musician, songwriter and or producer on 50 or more albums other than his own, and on many more songs by Bon Jovi, Celine Dion, Clay Aitken, Faith Hill, Blue Oyster Cult, Michael Bolton, Lita Ford, Fiona, Luc Plamondon, Charlebois, Patrick Bruel, Francis Cabrel, Garou, Eric Lapointe, Charles Aznavour, and Chilean rock band La Ley. That led to an irreconcilable rift with the label so he turned to writing and producing jingles and befriended a nobody calling himself Jon Bon Jovi who had a low-paying job working at the Power Plant studios. He moved to New York and recorded Subject: Aldo Nova in 1983 and Twitch in 1985 and both fell short in achieving the same commercial impact. The album spawned two hits (Fantasy and Foolin’ Yourself) that were its jet fuel and helped sell a couple of million copies of Aldo Nova in the US in short order. It was a motherlode of orchestral-rock, reminiscent of the best of Boston, Styx, Europe, and Triumph, with its shimmering phalanx of guitar over-dubs, swooping vocals and song hooks as addictive as laughter to a clown. He came to the fore at the birth of the ‘80s, in his 20s, after Portrait Records' New York office signed him and released his self-produced, eponymously titled debut album. Versatile and quite possibly a prodigy, the Montrealer is a bit of an anomaly. Aldo Nova is explaining his return from a 12-year, self-imposed quarantine that allowed him to work on a 23-song concept album he calls "an opera." He's calling it The Life and Times of Eddie Gage and it is to be released in intermittent installments, followed by a tour when it becomes practical to do so.
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