CBC Thunder Bay sits down with Blue Rodeo's Jim Cuddy

It's been 30 years since Blue Rodeo released its debut album, Outskirts, and the popular Canadian country rock band is hitting the road again on its latest tour, which is slated to take them from coast to coast.

The tour is in support of their latest album, 1,000 Arms, released in 2016.

For the second year in a row, the band's trek kicked off in Thunder Bay, Ont., as a near-sellout crowd packed the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium Wednesday night.

Prior to the show, CBC Thunder Bay reporter — and self-professed Blue Rodeo fan — Jeff Walters sat down with Jim Cuddy, to learn more about the new album, the tour and why the band is starting it in northwestern Ontario in the middle of winter.

Jeff Walters: Why are you starting a tour here for the second year in a row?

Jim Cuddy: First of all, we like coming up here. Places like Kangas Sauna, there's good food. Bob [Halvorsen — community auditorium general manager] is really nice to let us have the theatre the day before so we can put all our stuff up. So having a day to rehearse in a theatre is a really big advantage. It's nice to start here, go west, fly home, go east, come back home, so it works out logistically, just perfectly for us.

JW: Why would you want to start a tour in winter?

JC: Originally, it was because, if you toured in winter, you were going to communities that were glad to have a band come in January, because of the length of their winter. We ended up really enjoying it for several reasons: one, it's really nice to play to those audiences, two, it's really nice to see snapshots of Canadian winter — winter in Thunder Bay, winter in Saskatoon, Calgary, Vancouver — and thirdly, and importantly, when we had young kids it was the time when you were the least missed. To do a full tour in summer would be to waste all their holidays; if you're home by March Break, nobody cares.

JW: Do you find the crowd here makes a difference as opposed to a larger centre?

JC: I think, 10, 15 years ago, it was a lot different. I think there was a lot of regional differences, and I think certain people weren't as enthusiastic as others, but that has changed so much. People have migrated from province to province for jobs and back. I would say Thunder Bay has been unique in that it shares a kind of Ontario sensibility, it's pretty rowdy and pretty enthusiastic, but I think the rest of the country has sort of blended so it's not hugely different.

No one's going to be as enthusiastic as St. John's, Newfoundland — you can't beat that.

JW: Tell us about 1,000 Arms, the new album.

JC: We started out, wanting to do a late-70s kind of British pub rock record, we wanted to emulate Nick Lowe and Costello and those kind of guys. We wrote songs that fit that, but then they didn't sound like us, so then we started to add back in some of the more rural instruments and then it sounded like us and had the enthusiasm of those songs, it had the drunken, sloshy feel of some pub rock, but it sounded like us.  We were really excited about the sound.

We took some of the singing back to where we used to be, just Greg [Keelor] and I doing call-and-response or two-part harmonies and got rid of the block vocals a bit, so I think we were just rediscovering things we had done in the past that we hadn't done for awhile.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.