Shawn Hewitt Immensely Excited About Moving Forward

02/28/05 4:00pm

by Joel McConvey (CHARTattack)

Shawn Hewitt won't be Toronto's best-kept secret for much longer.

The ambitious, ingenious purveyor of Afro-kraut/ Neu!-soul/ any-other-genre-tag-made-up-explicitly for Hewitt's awesome blend of funk, trance-rock and classic soul has finally finished his debut EP and it promises to be a doozie.

Produced by Ian Blurton, who must be approaching some kind of world record for number of albums produced within a specified geographic area, the six song disc will be titled The Soft Society and is tentatively scheduled to drop on May 1. No one is more stoked than the gangly, engaging Hewitt, who says of himself and his band The National Strike, "We're excited. We're really, really excited. We're really excited, we're really excited."

That's excited.

"Right now we're in the mixing phase, going through the mixes and making sure it's the best it can be," says Hewitt of the disc, which was recorded at Blurton's storied Chemical Sound studio. "It's like taking a really great snapshot of the past two years, and when you look at the picture when it finally develops, you can see what the future looks like."

At first glance, Blurton — who tends to do his best work with the louder, more hirsute cave rock set — might seem like an odd choice for Hewitt. But the 28-year-old songwriter says he and the producer connected the first time they met.

"A lot of people have asked, 'Why Ian?'" says Hewitt. "But when I first met him, we had a conversation about music. And him being a music lover like myself and like the guys in the band [the single-named Jones and Aidan], we just connected with a lot of the bands that we talked about — Can, Donny Hathaway. Just running the whole gamut. So basically it all started from us having a music conversation, and him understanding and connecting with us on different things musically."

Hewitt delights in talking about his long-anticipated introduction to the masses and particularly likes referring to what he thinks are the disc's two foremost traits: adventurousness and accessibility — terms he prefers to any vague genre or style terms.

"It's like those two are having an intense love affair," he says of the descriptors. "But mostly I'm gonna let the music do the talking — let the pundits do their, 'Hey, it's like this and like that,' and just sit back and keep growing and progressing."

Hewitt will pave the way for The Soft Society's release with a big show at this year's CMW festival. This might be the last chance you get to see him before he blows up to K-OS proportions, so you'd best see him now. He's ambivalent about fame, but passionate about getting his music to as many people as possible.

"I'd be foolish if I said I didn't want to see any successes come from this," he says. "But what's more important is just progressing as a 28-year-old North American, trying to figure out what this thing is all about. It's all about connecting with people. A year from now, it'd be great to see success coming from connecting with people."

Shawn Hewitt And The National Strike will be playing at the Horseshoe Tavern on Thursday, March 3 @ 10 p.m. as part of the annual Chart/Horseshoe/Canadian Music Week showcases. —Joel McConvey