Songwriter reckons with past, present on new album

Grab a kitchen scale and you’ll quickly see that Jacob Brodovsky’s newest LP is exactly the same weight as his last one, but Tell the Kids We Tried is still the heaviest music released by the singer-songwriter.

Even on its more upbeat, playful tracks — reminiscent of jangly, optimistic indie rock from Canadian indie heroes such as Dan Mangan, Joel Plaskett and the Weakerthans — the newest release from the Winnipeg-raised artist tackles concurrent global fiascos such as climate catastrophe, political apathy, genocide and an abdication of human rights.

“Folk music is an intrinsically political genre,” the 35-year-old says. “The people who started (the Winnipeg) folk fest were intrinsically political people, and the best folk music that’s being made today is intrinsically political. I think in this moment to say that your music isn’t political is at least naive, if not ignorant.

“You can’t ignore what’s going on in the world. You can’t ignore how unkind people are to one another,” says Brodovsky, who displays a sign in his home studio endorsing Avi Lewis; he played the federal NDP leader’s April rally in Winnipeg.

Since picking up the guitar at age six and inheriting the lessons of Crosby, Stills and Nash via his parents’ CD player on daily commutes, Brodovsky has relied on music as a roadmap, compass and shelter amid geopolitical storms. With his latest record — a dispatch to future generations of parents and children — the songwriter tosses a life-preserver into the abyss and hopes listeners will latch on.

Tell the Kids We Tried — released this week through Dusseldorf’s Make My Day Records — is Brodovsky’s first record that could be categorized as fatherly in its approach. At live performances, the singer often recounts a bit of advice his own dad gave to him: it’s not about if you’re going to screw up your kids, it’s about how much.

On a global scale, Tell the Kids We Tried is about carving more empathetic and inclusive paths forward.

“I spend a lot of time contemplating the ethics of adding human beings to the world, and I think this record is more or less an exercise at trying to unpack that,” says Brodovsky, who with his wife is raising two children under the age of five.

Those kids are starting to talk: the eldest, is “an unvarnished mirror to everything that happens. Like having a lie detector following you around,” says Brodovsky.

The youngest is starting to mumble in patterns.

“They pick up on everything: how you’re feeling, how people around you are feeling, how you interpret other people, or how you view other people. They see everything. The other day I was telling (my eldest) I was scared of a lot of things when I was a kid, and he goes, ‘Who was taking care of you?’” Brodovsky says.

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While music has been his escape and his passion for decades, Brodovsky used to go elsewhere in the summer to find purpose and meaning, he tells the Free Press a few weeks ahead of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, where he will perform four daytime shows.

“I would have been at BB Camp on Town Island in Lake of the Woods. It was my whole life, basically. A job that I loved very much and cared about very much,” says Brodovsky, who was the pluralistic Jewish summer camp’s executive director for four years.

But that changed in April 2024, says Brodovsky, who elected to resign from the position under duress.

“It became very clear to me that the community I had been serving — not the camp itself, but the Winnipeg Jewish community — was no longer interested in me being a part of it because I expressed sympathy and solidarity for the Palestinian people, which I think is a very Jewish thing to do,” he says.

That spring, when the Winnipeg-based Palestinian-led rock band Op-Ed was scheduled to perform at the West End Cultural Centre, several right-wing Israel advocacy groups challenged the venue for its support of what they deemed a “terrorist-supporting concert,” says Brodovsky, who calls the band’s songwriter Tarek Abdel Aziz a friend.

In the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas on Israel, Op-Ed’s Art Antony was the first person to check in on Brodovsky to say that his family was praying for him.

Brodovsky sent an email to the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg expressing his concern about the way organizations aligned with the federation were depicting artists with whom they disagreed; he received a kind response from the federation, he says.

But in the days leading up to the show, fringe right-wing blogs posted screenshots of Brodovsky “liking” posts by Op-Ed, along with anonymously sourced “testimonials” about his political leanings. People Brodovsky grew up with, their parents and people he had never even met began calling him a traitor, a terrorist, or a kapo or worse.

“I didn’t find out about all these horrible things people were saying about me until the day my kid was born. We were in the delivery room, and my phone started blowing up. It kind of snowballed from there: for a month and a half, every time my phone buzzed, there was a new horrible thing that I was,” says Brodovsky.

Brodovsky says the online vitriol was terrifying.

“But I also know I didn’t do anything wrong, and I think that’s something that comes from being a dad now, too. You want to interrogate your own actions in a different way because you also have to think about how your kids are going to look at you, and how you’re going to explain your behaviour and actions to them.”

Though he says the camp’s board of directors stood behind him, Brodovsky saw the writing on the wall and decided to resign.

“I did not want to be a detriment to the campers’ or the staff’s ability to have a great summer at camp, and I didn’t want to subject my family to any more abuse or harassment or potential violence,” he says.

Brodovsky is quick to put his own life’s changes in perspective.

“When I look at what people are putting on the line, what Palestinian activists are putting in the line — I lost a job, absolutely — and I lost a lot too, but I live a life of luxury and comfort because I’m a white person in Canada, and I only turn on my Jewish identity when I want to, right?”

Still, what Brodovsky experienced was a loss of place and community, with ties severed to dozens of people he knew, cared about and had previously respected.

“Since then, I don’t really go into Jewish spaces or interact with the Jewish community at all,” he says. “I see people all the time that I knew in my past life, and generally I either get dirty looks or people just pretend not to notice me, which is fine, but you know, these are people that I had known for a decade, people whose kids I watched grow up, people who I bent over backwards to support.

“I’ve been trying to carve out space for myself to exist as both someone who cares deeply about the Jewish community and supporting young people, but who also does not jibe with Zionism. This essentially confirmed that there is no space for someone like that at this moment.”

That pain fuels the simplest but most effective song on Brodovsky’s newest record. Beneath It All, a duet with Charlotte Cornfield, is about “trying to hold onto a community while it shrinks into itself. A community of mostly good people blinded by trauma, grief and a refusal to acknowledge harm.”

Alongside his new record, Brodovsky is releasing an alternate version of the track to Bandcamp, with all proceeds going to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.