Hobbs' Pop Philosophy
by Fateema Sayani

*Greg Hobbs is ready to let a few philosophical musings creep into his customary songs about relationships and drinking.

The rootsy singer-songwriter's new disc Threats & Promises still mines those divey bars for tales of love gone wrong, and his heart shows the knife marks. But shuffle over to track nine, What Sandra Said, and do a little reading between the lines as he says, "My mind started to drift, like it sometimes does. Started thinking about the state of this place, those hawks and those doves."

The gist of the song is that the world isn't so black and white. Hobbs found that September 11 obliterated the grey area in thinking about the world. "There was this speech by Laura Bush that I saw somewhere," he says. Hobbs works as a researcher at the CBC in Toronto archiving footage for documentaries and scrolls through this stuff daily.

"She was saying that one of the good things that came out of September 11 was that there were more marriages than in the year prior. It's an odd thing to be proud of."

He says we have simplistic notions of good and bad and the result is apathy about the world around us. He deals with this more thoroughly in a song called Santo Domingo, one that's a live favourite though it didn't end up on the album. "I decided that it didn't fit. It was more poetic and my songs tend to be pretty straightforward. I don't want to use the word pretentious, because I quite like the song."

He says he's still for the straight-ahead approach in songwriting, not vague notions of head-muddling concepts, but his new songs reveal a slight shift away from matters of the heart and into meaty stuff that can be discussed over a brew.