Vue Weekly

‘Oh, God, that was a terrible show,” Cameron Latimer laughs over the phone, recalling a gig he played at the old Sidetrack Café a couple of years ago. “That night I got off stage and I was pissed off. We had hired this drummer from Winnipeg because our drummer bailed at the last minute for that tour, so he drove out there on his motorbike and met us. He was a great guy and he was a good drummer and everything, but he just didn’t know my stuff, and my bass player was my roommate and he didn’t know my stuff very well either. That was a gong show.”

It’s true: sometimes the best-laid plans just collapse right out from under you. West Coast country crooner Latimer knows that well, from his experience on the road and his efforts to get his debut solo record finished and onto the street.

“I’ve been working on it for ages,” he sighs. “I made a whole other album. There’s a song on the new record called ‘Gin Train,’ and my last record was gonna be called Gin Train and it was gonna be the single. I made the whole album, I finished the album, it was mastered and all that.”

What happened next was a disappointment for Latimer. He explains that some people had gotten involved with the album, helping him to pay for it simply because they wanted to. Unfortunately, no contracts were signed in the beginning, and when it came time to write something up the process dissolved into an ugly mess, so Latimer made a hard choice and walked away from the whole thing.

When plans do go awry, sometimes all you can do is cut your losses and move on. So as Latimer left his album behind, taking just three of the songs with him, he admitted to himself that he wasn’t entirely happy with the record anyway and set his mind to writing and recording Fallen Apart, the album that he was convinced that he could make.
“The first one was a whole bunch of different people and we tracked [all the instruments individually], and then the new album, it was recorded live with a totally different band,” he recalls. “I finally learned over the years that tracking a record kind of takes the soul out of it.” V