by Jim Kelly

Who: Tiny Bill Cody
What: A new and fascinating twist on the urban cowboy
Where: Hamilton, ON
To Contact: 245 Park St. North #1, Hamilton, ON L8L 1L9 (905) 525-5276, tor@artgalleryofhamilton.com, www.tinybillcody.com.

At first, I didn’t know what to make of this guy. Tiny Bill Cody? Cowboy songs? Is it some kind of post-modern folk music? Is it performance art? In a word, yes. Tiny Bill Cody is the alter-ego of Hamilton, ON singer-songwriter Tor Lukasik-Foss, whose Stranger We Have No Leader CD, released earlier this year, is the follow-up to 1995’s self-titled debut. Recorded using almost no overdubs and very little post-production, the disc’s power lies in its rich ideas and its bare-bones performances. “I had been playing with the cowboy image, and I thought it was a good metaphor,” Lukasik-Foss explains, “this idea of thinking about your city as a ghost town, and then thinking about ways to animate it [with] these clichés of cowboys and heroes.” To that aim, the opening track “Ride” is a galloping, sardonic call-to-arms to cure all urban dysfunction, spurred by Cody’s frantically folk-ish acoustic guitar. “Gene Autry’s Mission Statement” contains the lyrics “Is it naive to try to jam hope into today’s dark and cynical zeitgeist/Do pure words from an honest heart really stop anyone anymore and make them think twice?” intoned over a “Happy Trails”-type acoustic guitar plucking. I ask you, when was the last time you heard a cowboy song using the word ‘zeitgeist’? Intelligent and artful observations of the contemporary urban experience dressed up as cowboy folk songs. Wow. But it begs the question: Is this town big enough for Tiny Bill Cody? Pardner, I certainly hope so.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2001 at 9:39 am and is filed under Showcase. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.