Kevin Hearn, of the Barenaked Ladies, May Be the Most Important Person in Canadian Music Right Now

When Gord Downie was preparing for the live performances of his album Secret Path, Kevin Hearn turned his home into a sanctuary. He monitored Downie’s energy and supplemented him with fresh food and fresh air when Downie’s balance or concentration waned. He made the space as comfortable as possible — more comfortable than any traditional studio could be. In Downie’s last interview with Peter Mansbridge, there he is on Hearn’s battered couch, across from Hearn’s piano, talking about legacy, about friendship, about music.

Hearn, the 49-year-old musician best-known as the pianist of the Barenaked Ladies, was leading the band, and he knew all too well what the ailing Downie was going through in those last months. He’s survived cancer twice. He’d been on tour and played stadiums when leukemia left him so weak that his kidneys collapsed; he’d been in studio sessions where he wound up bloody, beneath his piano, out on the floor. And in those final days of rehearsals, he kept an arm around Downie and the Secret Path band as they prepared for both a beginning and an end — the debut performance of an album and the death of its star.

“Kev opened his home to all of us at a time when we were learning the songs for the show and simultaneously accepting Gord’s death with Gord in the room,” says Kevin Drew, the Broken Social Scene front man who produced the last two Downie solo records, as well as the last record by The Tragically Hip. “He walks this earth like a fragile prince who forgot he came from royalty.”

But Kevin Hearn is more than that. Over the last three decades, he has worked with some of the best musicians on the planet, including Neil Young, Tanya Tagaq, Elvis Costello, Tom Jones, and, for his final six years, Lou Reed. And he’s done it all without calling any attention to himself — despite the fact he might be the most melodic, generous person in Canadian music right now. In June, he released an instrumental record called Calm and Cents, the soundtrack to There Are No Fakes, a documentary about the Norval Morrisseau forgery ring that he unwittingly found himself in the middle of. It’s a busy, upside down summer culminating in 20 years of pleasure and pain. “Life’s a beautiful puzzle, then you fall to pieces,” Hearn says. “I’m happy I’m still alive. There must be a reason. I hope I can make the world a better place through my work.”

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Lou Reed is Kevin Hearn’s musical hero. He remembers being nine years old when he first heard Walk on the Wild Side, and when he discovered the Velvet Underground in high school, he taped a picture of Reed up in his locker. “I loved how his music could let my mind float away,” he says.

At 19, Hearn joined his first band, Look People, and was making ends meet working at President’s Choice and scoring Straight Up, a CBC drama with Sarah Polley. He was 21, playing with Corky and the Juice Pigs, when keyboardist Andy Creeggan decided to leave Barenaked Ladies, then riding their hit If I Had $1000000 and breaking into the States. Drummer Tyler Stewart asked Hearn to join his band for a two-month tour.

“Steven Page was essentially having a nervous breakdown, struggling to maintain his sanity,” says Stewart, adding that they subsequently fired their manager and toured for two years. Musically and emotionally, Hearn gave the band, including Page, with whom he’s still close, a boost. “He redefined the sound of BNL and that’s arguably our most successful time period. We had number one singles, toured all over the world, and he became a signature member—he forged us into the band we still are today.”

By the time Barenaked Ladies released Stunt in 1998 — the album that opens with the massive and massively polarizing “One Week” — Hearn was sick. He tried to hide it, but during a session, he fell to the studio floor, writhing in pain. He began getting nosebleeds. When he asked the doctors when he might get back to touring, he was told that, with leukemia, he might have five months to live.

“I started chemo during the One Week video, and the record went to number one while I was in the hospital going through my transplant,” he says. At the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, he listened to Magic and Loss, Lou Reed’s record about cancer. He bathed himself in its empathy. “Music has always been that for me,” he says. “You work through things with it. It’s a gift.”

Then Reed, who happened to share a label with BNL, sent Hearn an email that changed his life. He told him to endure and Hearn, inspired, made his own cancer album, H-Wing, which he sent to Reed, and Reed loved. By the time the two men met backstage at one of Reed’s New York concerts, the room was crowded — Willem Dafoe, Philip Glass, Neil Young. Reed spent the party holding Hearn’s hand. “Six months earlier I was dying. Strange, huh?”

From 2007 to the end of Reed’s life, in addition to his BNL gig, Hearn became Reed’s band leader. “People who are brilliant the way he’s brilliant, they generally keep their genius close to the vest,” says Dave Bidini of the Rheostatics, longtime friend of Gord Downie and publisher of the West End Phoenix. “Lou’s a legendary prick and a real taskmaster, but Kev was able to draw out his humanity — the last ten years of Lou’s musical career wouldn’t have occurred if Kevin had not been at the centre of that.”

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When Hearn went back on the road with BNL after surviving leukemia, he lacked the caregiver he would become. In 2005, after two days off in Salt Lake City, Hearn had disappeared until the band had security break through his hotel room door. He was hours away from complete kidney failure. He was a new father, dying — a rockstar who couldn’t stand up onstage.

“I guess Gord thought I knew the territory,” says Hearn, about when Downie first approached him to lead the Secret Path band on tour. Hearn played with Downie on his solo debut Coke Machine Glow and the Secret Path rehearsals began the same month that Lou Reed died. Downie was diagnosed with glioblastoma, terminal brain cancer, and Hearn was in charge of another doomed band.

“It’s bittersweet because you develop deeper friendships and it heightens all your awareness and makes you appreciate time,” says Hearn, whose idea was to get the band rehearsed at his home and then invite Downie to the sessions to work out his vocals at a more lavish studio, when the band knew their parts. Instead, Downie wanted to join the group right away — and rehearse the show at Kevin’s home. “He didn’t want to miss a thing,” says Hearn.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t just Downie who relied upon Hearn. His home was packed everyday with Downie’s family and team and emotions ran high. “I was angry and lost during those rehearsals because I couldn’t accept Gord’s death. It had been a while since Gord and I had been together and our lover/brother relationship was strained,” says Kevin Drew. “Kev pulled me aside and made a point to not miss the moment we were all in. He basically took my hand and guided me away from a very powerful regret to come. I will always owe him for that. Always.”

With the band focused on the music and Chanie Wenjack, whose narrative they recount on Secret Path, the singer was brilliant. He was alive.

“Whenever I miss him, I put on a record,” he says, and describes the entire experience — the music, the friendship, the bond — like this: “We went to the moon.”

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Hearn recently listened to a new record produced by his Secret Path bandmate Josh Finlayson of Gord Downie’s last songs. It’s “astounding,” he says as we’re driving home one afternoon to Calm and Sense, when he gets a call from his daughter Havana’s mother.

The way Hearn lovingly protected Downie and Reed, he also lives for his daughter. Havana has lissencephaly, a rare and inoperable brain disorder; she can’t speak or stand. And yet Hearn was told that he’d never have children, so she has always been his miracle. While Hearn was originally told Havana wouldn’t make it past 10, she’s now 14. A lot of living has happened in these past four years.

Few of Hearn’s friends have met his daughter, as it’s difficult to take her to one of his shows. But at home, she can sit on his piano bench and hold a note with him holding her hand, or feel the vibrations when he strums his guitar. “You can’t talk to her, so you have to connect with her in other ways,” he says. “It’s magical; a miracle — there’s nothing in the world I love more.”

This afternoon on the phone, Havana’s mom doesn’t expressly say that she needs him, but you can hear it in her voice. Hearn turns the car around.

Every life has its share of sorrow, and every man has opportunities to be shitty or great. Kevin Hearn has forged a unique identity that pairs virtuosic musicality with an open heart. He misses his friends, the iconic rock stars, like he loves his daughter, but he frames each loss like a dream he was fortunate to have shared. “I get to be with you until you leave us?” he says. “It’s an honour. I’ll be there ’til the end.”