Acrpost: A Project of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres

Event Description

In many ways, All the Angels Didn’t Scare Me marks C.R. Avery’s return to his roots – the storytelling that shaped him as a kid.

Raised in small-town Ontario and unable to focus on books as a child, C.R. was drawn to all things aural and lyrical – stand-up comedy, country ballads, sexual adventures and risqué episodes retold in hip hop lyrics.

“I was a kid who wanted to change his name to M.C. Howlin’ Wolf. I wanted to be D.J. Muddy Waters,” he tells the audience in an excerpt from a live show that opens “Troubled Youth.”

Over the years, he’s released 17 albums, from swamp city blues to spoken word performed with the Prague Symphony Orchestra, all infused with an outlaw outlook and attitude and a rock n’ roll middle finger ethos. And when it came time to create this record, he was feeling especially fatigued of the current musical trend toward inward, subconscious, "stream of consciousness" whisper-singing that sounds like an Instagram photo of wind chimes butterfly kissing a glockenspiel instead of a gutter wail of an unsung story that needs to be told, not left for dead.

All the Angels Didn’t Scare Me features finely painted portraits of people surviving and sometimes thriving in the brokenness of urban and rural life.