For more than a decade, Martin Tielli has been a lighthouse to the lucky, an impassioned and utterly original voice, guiding listeners through the suit-infested waters of commercialized pap to Canada's wild harbours where music and heart still matter.
Martin's instantly recognizable melodic howl and signature ethereal guitar playing, adored by fans and critics across North America, have made him a fixture in the record collections of the self-professed cognoscenti, no doubt to his own ambivalent approval.
"'O, my precious beautiful quiet self'" Martin has said of his latest solo album, We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman. "People forget to ask themselves, 'Why would anyone want to hear this? About how lonely I feel?' It's a fine line." But the record's reception, and his long-term love affair with fans, has proved that lots of folks are interested in Martin's musings.
Martin is perhaps best known as a member of the Rheostatics, the only band besides the Guess Who with two albums ranked in the top ten in a recent survey of music critics to determine Canada's top-100 rock records.
The Rheos have released eleven albums since 1987, inspired by such national icons as Stompin' Tom Connors, novelist Paul Quarrington, the Group of Seven, CBC's late-lamented late-night Nightlines, a gnomish steel-guitar player in southern Ontario, hockey player Wendell Clark, Gordon Lightfoot and more. "The modus operandi of the Rheostatics is that you can be a complete buffoon one minute and then say something profound the next,' says Martin. The band's fans tend toward rabid enthusiasm for all things Rheo, willing to share their contagion with reckless abandon. And a new album is in the works.
Martin's solo output was, until 2003, limited to two albums. In 1996, under the name Nick Buzz, Martin released the highly acclaimed Circo, which united him with musical idols Jon Goldsmith, Hugh Marsh and Rob Piltch. Goldsmith and Marsh rattled his teenage cage years earlier when they played with Bruce Cockburn, and Rob Piltch was a member of Blood, Sweat and Tears; for the fledgling 'solo' artist, no better accompanists could be imagined. Circo was re-released by Six Shooter Records in 2002.
In 2001, Martin recorded We Didn't Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman, essentially a live-from-the-floor acoustic album also released by Six Shooter Records. Long-time collaborator Michael Phillip Wojewoda, with whom the Rheostatics have recorded several albums, produced Poppy Salesman.
"I don't like twiddling knobs," Tielli explains, "and Mike is like a writing partner; he knows how to edit me immediately. His calls are freakishly uncanny. He'll suggest something and I'll fight it every time, but in retrospect it's always an amazing call -- not just, 'Oh yeah, you were probably right,' but 'Holy cow, you were so right.'"
In early 2003, Martin announced the almost tragically ambitious goal to release four albums in a single-calendar year, a subscription series including Operation Infinite Joy, Schoenberg Cabarets, The Ghost of Danny G and New Gold.
The music on these albums, which will also include extensive original art by Martin, is wildly divergent, including new songs with the band Operation Infinite Justice (Ford Pier, Greg Smith and Barry Mirochnick) created to support the Poppy Salesman tour, a Nick Buzz alumni reunion performing pieces by classical composer Arnold Schšnberg, the perfect Hallowe'en record about a haunted southern Ontario town, and a symphonic work arranged by Jon Goldsmith. Timidity is not among Martin's faults; tardiness, on occasion, has been. Whether meeting the release schedule will require divine intervention, a grease-painted Zeus thundering down from the heavens in a rattling sedan chair, remains to be seen. But no one contests that Martin delivers.
Martin has also lent his musical talents to other premiere Canadian acts, including Jane Siberry, the Barenaked Ladies, The Waltons, Meryn Cadell, Ashley MacIsaac, Tamara Williamson, Mia Sheard and, most recently, Kevin Hearn.
Martin received the Ontario Arts Council's prestigious K. M. Hunter Award for Music in 2002, and was voted Best Guitar Player in the NOW magazine 2000 reader poll. He has composed soundtracks for movies and television, as a solo artist and with the Rheostatics, including music for the motion picture Whale Music, starring another Canadian enigma, Maury Chaykin.
Tielli's talents include the visual arts. A gifted painter, he has contributed original artwork to every Rheostatics album and both solo projects, with a 24-page booklet planned to support the subscription series version of Operation Infinite Joy.
Martin may be Italian born, but the Northern Lights, nickel smelters, black spruce, Canadian shield, long cold roads and other features of our unique northern landscape have infused his soul with Canadian magic. Those who know, know they are among the lucky.
"What is a monster to do? When my teeth are so new and my tongue is for licking." - "Shaved Head," Whale Music
* Selected quotes taken from interviews in Eye magazine, "Birth of a Salesman," September 13, 2001, and Now magazine, "Tielli Goes Static Free," September 13, 2001.
• "As with every Rheostatics release Martin Tielli has lent his genius to, it really comes as no surprise that his first solo album brims with the same kind of bent greatness we've come to know and love... If this release doesn't make the country's ears perk up and give credit to one of our generation's most gifted Canadian songwriters then, sadly, nothing will. Martin has a knack for writing beautiful songs and then warping them slightly into something that may not be pop in the traditional sell-a-million-copies-for-the-man sense, but into something that seems otherworldly." - Tim Melton (www.chartattack.com)
• "His first true solo album is a raw yet rich recording featuring acoustic guitar, the intimate intricacy of Tielli's compelling voice and little else, aside from a lot of cushioning reverb. This album smells like hardwood, its ambience recalling an old cabin in northern Ontario in the morning of a summer rainstorm." - Michael Barclay (Exclaim!)
• "This is the kind of album critics call reflective, though the best parts of it scratch beneath the finished thought to expose the process of thinking itself. Some of these songs actually seem to rouse themselves from an unguarded motion of mind, the way fingers might stray across a fretboard looking for a path that hasn't yet revealed itself." - Robert Everett-Green (Globe and Mail)
• "His singing can twist from achingly gentle to utterly wrathful in an instant. At times, Tielli sounds as though he might actually be throttling the neck of his guitar. This isn't easy listening by any means, but well worth your time." - (Ottawa Citizen)
• "Martin Tielli's solo debut album a special occasion far beyond a date circled on the calendar. Enigmatic, charismatic, tragi-matic? Tielli had all the requistite "matics" going for him long before he stepped out of the comfortable skin of the Rheostatics to explore the relative thinness of his own membrane. Tielli's album, We DidnŐt Even Suspect That He Was The Poppy Salesman, is subtle and sparse and weighty and strong. All at once." - (Hamilton Spectator)
