John K. Samson – THE QUALITY OF MERCY

2026-08-092026-08-10 by David Hughes

81 Days, 81 Years

Last year I wrote that I might wait a few months before listening to John K. Samson’s last two songs in his serial of the cat named Virtute. I finally bought the album containing them, Winter Wheat. I didn’t cry, tho’ I should have. “Virtute at Rest,” ambiguously, maintains the cat’s nagging, I swear you can do it, while the human marks the 21st day at the “17th Street Treatment Centre.”

Like I said, I should have cried because today is my own 81st day drinking nearly nothing, sans treatment, centre or self-help, and I’m not white knuckling. On May 21 I had a pivotal CT scan that, unlike previous borderline liver scans, nudged me to regroup. Like a cocktail, the scan was the sum of its parts: ostensibly requisitioned for a kidney stone but with seven further findings. I’m haunted by what a listener said about Virtute, quoted in my comment: “This song series might have saved my life, more than once, over the last two decades.” It didn’t save mine, because I heard only half its parts until today, but, as the commenter says, it “might have” or, rather for me, “still might.”

2025-11-222026-08-09 by David Hughes

Et tu, Virtute.

Yesterday the fitness instructor for our apartment building said she’d grown weary of the Spotify playlist she’d cued up for the past few sessions. Nominally “Tom Petty,” the list, liberally, blared hits from the likes of Hall & Oates, Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and other mainstream popsters. When she asked for suggestions of a new list, I hesitated, but then figured The Weakerthans might be a good segue. And I was right.

Spotify’s algorithm for Petty calculated that Hall & Oates’s “Maneater” belonged in the same batch as “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” my favorite Petty tune.¹ To my surprise, during the half dozen Weakerthans songs to which we stretched (our strength-building having been performed during the first, mm…, stretch): no such mismatched filler. Further surprise came when the playlist contained not one but both of the band’s two songs sung from the point of view of a cat.

2018-11-172025-11-23 by David Hughes

The feeble strength of one

Comrades in Denver recently attended a performance by the Manitoba band Propagandhi. I knew the group’s name but not their music and poked around a bit. If you like your tunes hard and fast, guitar-driven and polemically positioned, with gorgeously apocalyptic album art, this is up your alley. But I was quite surprised to learn that John K. Samson was the band’s bassist for nearly six years.

According to the cliché about art school, you learn the rules before breaking them. Samson can be seen, superficially, as having worked in reverse, with a minimalist-with-message band before leaving school to fashion, with The Weakerthans, a new song in an old mold: figurative, more muted, embellished with just enough magic in its realism to keep us inquiring. Perhaps the finest example of this craft is the band’s ballad “Pamphleteer.”