MEDIA

MEDIA

He walks into the upscale downtown restaurant sporting a bushy, unkempt beard, a lumberjack shirt, cheapo sunglasses and, most puzzling of all, a Hartford Whalers ballcap.

You almost expect him to ask for spare change. Instead, trying to explain the lyrics on his new album, he says matter-of-factly: "I went through a death jag."

At times like these, you worry about Greg Keelor.

But concern is quite unnecessary. The singer-guitarist for popular Canadian rock group Blue Rodeo has stopped drinking, has quit ingesting mind-altering drugs and, perhaps for the first time in a long time, has found peace in his own skin.

This personal journey is documented on his first solo album, Gone, which hits record stores tomorrow. You can hear a preview tonight when Keelor and his solo band perform at the University Theatre.

His journey starts with that "death jag" a couple years ago.

"I'd either be so happy I thought I would dissolve, or so depressed that I'd think: `Take me away if this is all you have to offer,' " he recalls.

"When I started meditating on the thought of my mortality, there were a few things I wanted to tidy up -- one of those was trying to find my (birth) mother. It sort of felt important to meet the woman who brought me into this incarnation if I was going to find this place called home."

So the adoptee sought out and met his birth mother, Mary Theresa McIntyre, who came from Inverness, Cape Breton, and now resides in Timmins, Ont.

Keelor also learned his birth name is Francis McIntyre.

"There has always been a loner thing in me ... and I wondered if that was from being taken from my mother's (breast) at three months," he says. "My cells rejoiced when I finally re-embraced (her)."

Around the same time, Keelor was suffering from cranial and rib injuries sustained after falling from a ladder. Feeling like "my brain and reality was unravelling," Keelor travelled to India to visit a guru named Papaji on the recommendation of his cranio-therapist.

"In my own mythology, India has been the land of the answer.... Once I got there, my heart exploded. I was very open to what was going on."

Flying back from India, Keelor was physically and mentally rejuvenated; he also felt determined to record a solo CD.

"I was just thinking: `I've had this lingering desire to do a solo record for a long time and I'd hate to die in this plane coming home and have this desire (unfulfilled)," says Keelor.

Fittingly, Gone is a quiet and meditative recording on which Keelor sings about death, not as an end but as a beginning, and about his search for home.

Hindu spirituality permeates the disc; in fact, Gone's first single, White Marble Ganesh, features Indian percussion and a Hare Krishna chant. Keelor says he no longer needs his old guru -- drugs.

"Sometimes with drugs, there's a sort of neurosis -- a paranoia -- attached to the education and the bliss," he says.

"When I had that fall, that was the beginning of my grounding. The fall said to me: Experience what this is; quit flying around this incarnation; quit taking these pills. Feel it for real.

"Now I like being straight. I like feeling grounded for a change rather than always being, uh, completely burnt."