The album is called ‘Something Easy’ — but it was anything but for Justin Rutledge

“Something Easy”? No. No, it was not.

Call it a subtle inside “dad joke,” but the title of Justin Rutledge’s latest album couldn’t be further from the truth. Written and recorded entirely at home during stolen late-night hours in the attic amidst the paranoid tranquility of COVID lockdown with two young children underfoot, “Something Easy” documents the Toronto singer/songwriter’s determined efforts to teach himself the technical ins-and-outs of making an entire record from scratch — while at the same time reckoning with the future of his two-decade-long musical career.

In the back of his mind the whole time, you see, was the question of whether he really wanted to do this for a living anymore.

“Yeah, absolutely. Priorities shift,” affirmed Rutledge earlier this week over a couple of drinks in Sorauren Park. “Music was my priority — and my relationship, of course — but music was always paramount to me and the songs I created were paramount to me and now something has taken its place. Two things have taken its place, named Jack and Louie, and also my marriage and, you know, I’m in my mid-40s and music has become something I go to to discern what’s happening in my daily life. It’s part of the process.

“It’s finding the time, that’s the trickiest part these days. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Carving out time to write a song or to spend some time with an idea, I feel very guilty when I do it now because I could be spending that time with my kids or, perhaps, that means my wife is looking after the kids. So I’m struggling with that right now as a new father: finding time for creativity.

“I’m in a relationship where that’s encouraged and it’s, like, ‘Go upstairs, take your time,’ but it’s something internal, something within me. I’d rather be spending time with my kids as opposed to spending time with my guitar, you know? So it’s tricky and I understand why sometimes, as artists get older, there are six years between records all of a sudden. ‘What the hell happened?’ Well, they got married and raised a couple of kids and they’re at soccer practice.”

“Something Easy,” released on May 19, thus represents Rutledge’s efforts to “stoke that creative fire, keep those embers burning” during his “off hours” as a new parent to two boys, now aged two and four. And while he jokes that trying to drum up interest in a new record from a “a white guy in his 40s, 10 albums in” is a tough job these days, the circumstances of “Something Easy’s” creation have allowed him to throw a few surprises his devoted fan base’s way nearly 20 years along from his internationally praised 2004 debut, “No Never Alone.”

There are atmospheric synths and programmed drums in the mix, lending his literate, yet never overwritten songwriting a seductively tranquil late-night vibe that often draws its inspiration from ambient electronic music as much as it does folk.

Rutledge also took guitar lessons for the first time in his life in the overall pursuit of self-betterment that was the recording process, which also involved many wee-hours calls to supportive friends for technical advice on how to navigate his way through that process.

The result is a patient, layered headphone record that really only gives itself up entirely if you put in the time to soak in the space and the subtle detail, not to mention the detailed economy of language on display in a collection of songs that Rutledge realized after the fact tend to dwell on specific moments from his youth. Unsurprisingly, since he did a lot of growing up in the run-up to making the record, not just becoming a father but getting a degree in arts administration and taking a “real” job doing social-media support for Massey Hall.

“I start writing with a feeling as opposed to a storyline, you know?” he said. “But then I slowly realized that most of these songs were about the span of my life between, like, 15 and 21 years old. ‘Angry Young Man’ is about that angry young man, ‘Seventeen’ is about that age, ‘London’ is about the year I lived in London when I was 18. But there’s not a nostalgia. I’m not looking back ‘bittersweetly.’ it’s all part of that process, trying to remember those moments and trying to discern who those people were. So unintentionally I wrote an album about my youth.”

In any case, “Something Easy” deserves a look if you haven’t paid much attention to Justin Rutledge of late. It’s not quite his “Kid A,” but it does a nice job of refreshing his sound for the future, whatever that future might hold. All those sleepless nights and frustrating dead ends did bear fruit in the end.

“It allowed me to tinker a little bit more and learn a hell of a lot. I think the album, in a way — in a big way — is people hearing me learning everything, learning how to make an album, clinically and technically, and from an engineering standpoint. Because there were so many f–k-ups,” he laughed. “A song like ‘Cowards,’ for example, is a song that was a series of f–k-ups until I didn’t f–k up anymore.

“But it was interesting and, from a songwriting perspective, I didn’t sit down to write these songs on the guitar. I actually mapped them out on the computer and went with a vibe and ‘Oh, I like this keyboard part’ or ‘I like this synth line’ or ‘I like this melody’; instead of figuring out a structure on the guitar I would work from a sequence that I created on the computer or on the keyboard.”

Rutledge will perform a handful of shows in support of the “Something Easy” release — one at the new TD Music Hall above Massey Hall on Thursday and a pair of sold-out gigs at the Red Bird in Ottawa on Friday and Saturday — while he figures out his next move. He’s already working on the next album, “one hour a night,” and it’s already sounding different than this one, so it looks as though music continues to exert the same strong hold on him it has since he first picked up a guitar at 15 and performed for his first high school variety show.

“I couldn’t shake that feeling of immediate reciprocity and that rush, and there was no way I was not performing live for the rest of my life,” he conceded. “But it’s funny these days because I have this show at the TD Music Hall and two sold-out shows in Ottawa next weekend and that excitement has translated into something else. I don’t know if it’s, like, a minor stage fright or just me being overly critical. So we’ll figure it out tomorrow at rehearsal.”

Ben Rayner is a Toronto-based journalist and a frequent contributor to the Star’s Culture section. Follow him on Twitter: @ihatebenrayner

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