I've Got a Hole Where My Heart Should Be

You can hear the riff before the singer even opens his mouth. A lean, fuzzy guitar figure walks in, the drums lock onto a pocket that could have come off a 1973 FM single, and then Ewan Currie leans into the microphone like a guy who has already decided he is leaving town. That is “I’ve Got a Hole Where My Heart Should Be,” the lead single from The Sheepdogs’ 2018 album Changing Colours, and it is still one of the cleanest shots of prairie boogie the Canadian rock circuit has put on the air. Three minutes and fifteen seconds. No wasted bars. A chorus you can shout from the back of a club without looking at a lyric sheet.

The lyric is a rolling confession from a man who refuses to sit still. He calls himself a part-time lover and an all-around guy, claims the perpetual high, and tells whoever is listening that if the mood is not exactly right he is going to spread his wings and take flight. Then the hook lands four times in a row: “I got a hole where my heart should be.” It is not a sob story. It is a shrug set to a stomp. Hard-luck woman meets an overzealous guy, he does not take his own advice, and the band keeps the groove moving so the empty chest never turns into a dirge. Critics who caught the record early called the track the one that defined the group, fuzzed guitars interlocking, a chorus built to knock drinks off a table. Louder later tagged the same number uproarious and pointed to the twin-guitar weave the band likes to call guitarmony. That word fits. The parts answer each other the way the Allman Brothers used to, only tighter and a little drier, the way a Saskatoon band hears the South through Canadian radio.

The single arrived on October 13, 2017, months ahead of the album, and it did the job a lead single is supposed to do. It climbed to number one on the Billboard Canada Mainstream Rock chart, the band’s third chart-topper in that format, and it became a set-list fixture the minute the tour buses rolled. Changing Colours itself landed on February 2, 2018, on Warner Music Canada, with Dine Alone handling a chunk of the marketing. Seventeen tracks, forty-nine minutes and change, recorded at Taurus Recording in Toronto and co-produced by Thomas D’Arcy and Currie. The band took their time on purpose. Earlier records had been cut in a couple of hard weeks. This one stretched across roughly six months, sometimes live off the floor, sometimes built track by track, with the five of them stacking harmonies until the room felt crowded. On the seventh anniversary of the release the group looked back and called it a labour of love, an homage to those sprawling, slightly overgrown records they grew up on, excessive and concise at the same time. It peaked at number five on the Canadian albums chart and picked up a Juno nomination for Rock Album of the Year. The sleeve, for anyone who still buys vinyl, nods to the 1968 self-titled album by the Har-You Percussion Group. They even cut an infomercial for the thing, complete with a fake 1-800 number, because a band this deep into the old playbook cannot resist a little television schtick.

Track two sits right behind the opener “Nobody,” and the pairing is deliberate. “Nobody” swings like a mid-seventies bar-band Stones cut. “I’ve Got a Hole Where My Heart Should Be” answers with the southern-rock riff the Sheepdogs have always treated as home turf. Around them the album wanders further than the early records did: a Havana sway on “The Big Nowhere,” trombone from Shamus Currie on “I Ain’t Cool,” clarinet drones from Ewan left over from high-school band, mandolin, banjo, vibes, glockenspiel, even a short instrumental named for Jimmy Bowskill’s hometown. American Blues Scene heard Allman-style bridges and machine-gun guitar. Spill Magazine heard Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allmans, and Crosby, Stills and Nash filtered through prairie wheat. The band itself has never pretended otherwise. They grew up in Saskatoon, not Muscle Shoals, and they will tell you they never drove a combine. The sound still reads as southern because that is the radio they loved.

The Sheepdogs started in 2004 as a trio called The Breaks: Ewan Currie on guitar and vocals, Ryan Gullen on bass, Sam Corbett on drums, three University of Saskatchewan students jamming blues-rock in Corbett’s parents’ basement. The name came from a childhood story. Young Ewan wandered off the front yard, and his mother found him in a park in the company of a dog. They put out Trying to Grow and The Big Stand on their own, then broke wider with Learn & Burn in 2010, a Juno winner and a platinum seller in Canada. The real lightning strike was August 2011. After more than a million and a half online votes they became the first unsigned band ever to land the cover of Rolling Stone, beating fifteen other acts in the magazine’s Choose the Cover contest. The prize included an Atlantic deal, a spot on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and a photo by Danny Clinch. Currie later said the years before that cover were bleak: friends getting jobs and getting married while he was still chasing a dream with no money and a car he could not afford to register. The self-titled 2012 album, produced by Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, went platinum. Future Nostalgia followed in 2015. Changing Colours was the sixth studio album and the first to feature Bowskill, the Ontario multi-instrumentalist who widened the palette. Shamus Currie, Ewan’s brother, held down keys and brass. Corbett and Gullen stayed in the engine room. Not long after the record, Corbett stepped away to fight testicular cancer and cut a solo album; the band kept working, later returning with Outta Sight in 2022 and Keep Out of the Storm more recently. Two platinum albums, platinum singles in “I Don’t Know” and “Feeling Good,” and a shelf of Junos, including New Group, Single, and Rock Album honours from the 2012 sweep, sit behind the road miles.

What the hole-in-the-heart song still proves is that the old FM virtues never really left. A strong riff, a chorus you can learn on the first pass, guitars that talk to each other, and a singer who sounds like he means the exit line. Put it between a Skynyrd deep cut and something from the Guess Who and it does not flinch. That is the neighbourhood The Zoo keeps open, commercial-free and built for album sides rather than skip buttons. Spin the rest of Changing Colours while you are at it. “Nobody,” “Let It Roll,” and the live staples that grew out of those Toronto months all belong on the same stack of records.

The Sheepdogs keep the lights on at their own shop, thesheepdogs.com, with tour dates, vinyl, and the new records posted as they drop. The verified page at Facebook is where they post backyard sessions and show notices. Photos and tour scraps land on Instagram. The road report and the short takes run on X. Fans tracking every club and festival date keep a running book at setlist.fm, and the concert calendar lives on Songkick. When you want the station that still plays this kind of record the way it was built to be heard, the door is open at The Zoo.