Canadian singer Murray McLauchlan will be performing tunes from his vast repertoire while featuring cuts from his 2017 release Love Can’t Tell Time during a City stop Oct. 27th at the Memorial Centre.

Few have made such an indelible mark on the Canadian music scene like McLauchlan, who has released a whopping 19 albums and landed 11 Juno Awards.

And his creativity seems to know no bounds – McLauchlan is also a painter, an author, an actor and a radio host.

Until recently his touring had been restricted to Lunch At Allen’s, whose members also include Ian Thomas, Marc Jordan and Cindy Church.

But with the release of Love Can’t Tell Time, he’s back on the road.

“I like to think of a concert tour as a kind of roving gallery to test your art and your ideas. I try to do my very best to make it worthwhile for folks to be there and to perhaps look at things in a new way when they leave.”

As to Love Can’t Tell Time, McLauchlan said the project started to come together shortly after the release of his Human Writes record. “I went to live in Italy with my wife Denise for a few months,” he explained.

“And I started to learn a new guitar language, a new chord language. It’s based on a system called Shell Voicings, and what that is is it opens the door to being able to play jazz.

“Essentially, what it allowed me to do once I really started to work on it was to play music that I had always loved but had found that I couldn’t really access very easily because the language that I had was basically folk and rock,” he said.

“Part of the deal too was that I had some songs that I had written – many on piano – that I had written for a project that never came to fruition. But I loved the songs, and I realized that there was sort of a thread in some of those songs. If you wanted to put a word to it, they were kind of ‘anti-ageist’.”

Looking at the title song, for instance, it’s about how love in all its intensity doesn’t just happen to people who are in high school or who are 21 or 22 years old.

“So that idea that life as you get older is a state of decline I think is an idea that’s been sold to us by commercial culture, when in fact I subscribe more to David Suzuki’s idea that as you gain experience and wisdom, life becomes a richer experience.

“I took the whole idea and I decided that I would go into the studio and do a record that was kind of like the ones that used to get made. Sit down with an old 1938 guitar and an upright bass player and a great big old U47 tube mic and just play it right off the floor.

“The result was something I found mixed itself, and that had a really organic, pleasing and emotional feel for me. I think if you over produce things technically, you lose a lot of the soul.”

McLauchlan originally hails from Scotland. The family relocated to Toronto when he was just five.

“Essentially, in order to pursue my life, I fought very hard to go to art school which was my gateway to the world. My first impulse was to be a visual artist – music kind of rapidly followed suit when I was exposed early on to it.

“But it didn’t fully take root until I was in my early years at art school. But I had to leave home at 17 in order to blossom and spread my wings.”

Over the years, he certainly found his niche as a singer and audiences have been quick to appreciate what he’s had to offer over the years.

There is clearly no doubt McLauchlan took the correct path in life.

“I realized some time ago that I love playing music and if I don’t do it, I lose a big portion of myself and something important in me starts to disappear,” he said. “So I have a great love and a respect for what I do. There is a sense in me that I have been subject to the wildest of good fortunes to be able to do what I do on my own terms, for as long as I have, and find that people are still supportive of that to the point where I can still go out there and do what I do.”

For tickets, check out tickets.blackknightinn.ca or call 403-755-6626.