Murray McLauchlan is the winner of an enviable 11 JUNO awards and composer of over 35 hit singles including the SOCAN Classics Farmer’s Song, Down by the Henry Moore, and Try Walkin’ Away. His hit recordings in the roots, rock and country genres have earned him the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, SOCAN’s National Achievement Award, and places in the Canadian Country Music and Mariposa Folk Foundation halls of fame. He is a member of the Order of Canada.
For five decades, McLauchlan’s sympathetic song portraits of ordinary folk have appealed to our social conscience. Born in Scotland in 1948 and educated in Toronto, where he studied art, he began singing in coffeehouses at age 17. When he played his bittersweet compositions Old Man’s Song and Child’s Song for American folksinger Tom Rush on the back steps of The Riverboat, Rush became the first to record McLauchlan’s insightful songs. Others to cover McLauchlan’s work over the decades include Bonnie Dobson, John McDermott, Renée Claude, David Wiffen, George Hamilton IV, Waylon Jennings, Kathy Mattea, David Bromberg, The Ennis Sisters, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, R. Harlan Smith, Walter Ostanek, Bob Neuwirth, 3’s a Crowd, Melanie Safka, and Junkhouse.
In 1971, McLauchlan recorded “Song from the Street,” the first of 18 albums to date and his first for True North Records. It went top 40 in Canada.
A “Billboard” magazine review of a 1974 McLauchlan performance in New York City still rings true today: “[He] May be the most powerful singer-songwriter on the scene today; half observer, half participant in the assorted bits of living that become his themes. He structures his songs simply, gives them melodies and choruses that lodge in the mind and delivers them with a punch that drives the message home.”
McLauchlan’s 1973 top-ten hit The Farmer’s Song drew attention to the industrial forces decimating family farms, while earning him his first JUNOs for best songwriter, folk single, and country single. It was the first of many McLauchlan tunes, including the double No. 1 hit Down by the Henry Moore, to cross over on both pop and country charts; his “Sweeping the Spotlight Away” album earned him JUNO’s best country vocalist award.
Tom Wilson of Blackie and the Rodeo Kings calls McLauchlan “Canada’s most culturally conscious songwriter during the 1970s…. Canadians were hungry at the time to be acknowledged by our own …and Murray was one of the first artists to really step up to the plate and do that.”
McLauchlan’s first gold record came with the 1976 album “Boulevard,” which included the hit single On the Boulevard. More gold, and JUNOs as folk artist and country male vocalist, became his with the “Greatest Hits” and “Whispering Rain” albums.
His songwriting, whether in his earlier narrative style or his later impressionistic one, has definite grassroots appeal. And the visual sense he developed while studying art as a youth still inspires his songwriting: “I always try to write visually, to put someone into their context,” he explains.
Through the 1980s, McLauchlan enjoyed further success with hit singles like Do You Dream of Being Somebody?, Somebody’s Long Lonely Night, Little Dreamer, and Never Did Like That Train. He rounded out the decade with the anthem If the Wind Could Blow My Troubles Away, participation in Tears Are Not Enough, and his JUNO-nominated album “Swingin’ on a Star.”
He told FYI Music News, “Songwriting is taking the elements of your life and what you’re exposed to … and distilling them to a point where they actually matter to somebody else.”
McLauchlan’s recent endeavours include the group Lunch at Allen’s, which he co-founded, and his 2012 hit albums “Human Writes” and “Love Can’t Tell Time.” Recently, Widespread Panic recorded a hit rock cover of his dark ode Honky Red. And his Child’s Song was featured in the hit NBC TV show “This Is Us.” His most recent recording, 2021’s Hourglass has made numerous best of and top ten lists in Canada, the U.S. and throughout the world. His “A Thomson Day”, a tribute to the work of Group of Seven painter Tom Thomson resulted in a collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario and is now a fan favourite.
McLauchlan has served on the boards of SOCAN, the SOCAN Foundation, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Songwriters Association of Canada. He was the host of CBC’s “Swinging On A Star” radio show with over a million listeners every week. He served on the board of the Room 217 Foundation, an organization that is involved in using music to ease suffering in palliative and end of life situations as well as dementia and Alzheimer’s care, and produced the “Voices That Care” benefit show at the Glenn Gould Theatre in Toronto. Murray still does a great number of concert appearances across Canada.
