A Defining Voice in
Canadian Music
On Harvest Highway, Jimmy Rankin hits the road again, time travelling and traversing far-flung destinations, along with his native Nova Scotia, through his singular brand of East Coast folk-rock. The Cape Breton icon’s eighth solo album is rich in the narrative songwriting traditions that Rankin has been honing for nearly his whole life, filled with crackling yarns and poignant chronicles about feverish marriages in Thunder Bay, unmoored Newfoundlanders, lovers on the run, and fallen soldiers in France.
Bookended by songs about home, the collection roams a trajectory not so different from Rankin’s life, with narrators who relish adventure while also yearning for the homeland from which they first pulled their roots. It finds Rankin at the height of his songwriting powers. “I’ve been working toward this album for my entire career,” he says.
Rankin nods to Nova Scotia’s Highway 101, running through the fertile Annapolis Valley and down the southern shore of the Bay of Fundy, with the album’s wistful title track, an Americana-tinged road tune with one eye on the asphalt and one on the figurative rearview mirror. He looks back to his early years with traditionals like the lovesick “Peggy Gordon” and the bittersweet farewell “Banks of Sicily,” both tunes he first heard as a kid on fellow Caper John Allan Cameron’s records.
There is plenty of kitchen-party spirit in the toe-tapping “Irish Red.” The rowdy, vintage country-rocker “Sue St. Marie” runs roughshod all around small-town Ontario; on the rollicking “Drunk or Sober,” Rankin sings about true-blue friendship in what is sure to be a fan-favourite singalong chorus; and “Our Time Is Tonight” dials up a fiery intensity with its tale of forbidden love.
History abounds, too. Sombre Wurlitzer carries “Marasheen Farewell,” about a relocated Newfoundland community, while “Missing at the Somme” imagines the tragic life of a young 20th-century soldier who fought in one of human history’s most lethal battles. Rankin takes a commanding turn at the piano on the penitent “Doors of Assisi” and on the album’s heartfelt finale, “My One Direction,” a moving ballad about finding his way back to a different definition of home: the love of his life.
Some of the songs on Harvest Highway have been brewing with Rankin for more than a decade, some have roots reaching back more than a century, and some are newcomers to his body of work. All are informed by a lifetime in music.
In his early years with Cape Breton’s favourite musical brood, Mabou’s The Rankin Family, Jimmy established himself as a torchbearer of East Coast folk and one of the most respected songwriters in Atlantic Canada. Songs like “Mull River Shuffle” have endured for decades through traditional renditions at Nova Scotia weddings and dance nights and through countless cover versions paying homage to the Rankins.
In 2013, CBC listeners voted the 1994 JUNO Award-winning single “Fare Thee Well Love” the number-one East Coast song of all time, and it was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2020. If you live outside the Maritimes, in Canada or internationally, and know the sound of East Coast folk music, it is likely thanks in part to Jimmy.
His reputation as a compelling writer and hitmaker spills into his solo work as well. Since his 2001 debut album Song Dog, he has been a chart fixture, racking up awards for songs including “Followed Her Around,” “Midnight Angel,” “Morning Bound Train,” “Slipping Away,” and “Here in My Heart.” Across his solo and Rankin Family work, Jimmy has earned five JUNO Awards, seven Canadian Country Music Awards, and 27 East Coast Music Awards.
Harvest Highway is a natural continuation of the sound he fine-tuned with 2018’s Moving East. After leaving Nashville’s honky-tonks behind and returning to Nova Scotia’s coastal climes in 2017, he also wanted to return to writing and playing the music he was steeped in during his youth.
Teaming up with fellow East Coast hero Joel Plaskett, who produced and played multiple instruments on both Moving East and Harvest Highway, Rankin established the earthy, down-home sound that serves his latest records so well, taking full advantage of Plaskett’s analog approach at Fang Recording in Dartmouth.
“Joel is a producer, he has the studio, but he’s also a singer and a songwriter and a touring musician,” Rankin says. “So he knows live and he also knows studio, and we have a similar interest in those albums from the ’60s and ’70s that have a sound that most modern recordings just can’t touch.”
Recorded to tape with vintage microphones, the expertise of engineer Thomas Stajcer, and contributions from studio session all-stars JP Cormier, Ron Hynes, Dale Murray, Jordan Murphy, and Madison Violet, Harvest Highway gets its organic feel from almost entirely live-off-the-floor takes and Rankin and Plaskett’s shared love for classic production.
Paired with Rankin’s masterful and evocative songwriting about place and purpose, the album’s warm, lived-in sound will resonate with anyone who has ever left home behind.
“I’ve travelled around the world and I’ve lived in other places, and I think like a lot of East Coasters, I feel a profound connection to the place,” Rankin says. “People really feel they need to come back here. It’s where they’re from, after all. It’s where their roots are.”
