Bryan Potvin's creative heartbreak

Bryan Potvin's life fell apart in one exquisitely painful moment: He lost his marriage (after five years) and his job (guitarist with the Northern Pikes) virtually simultaneously.

So, after a near-nervous breakdown and two definitely dark years, he decided to do what any good artist would do -- share his pain. Heartbreakthrough, released this month, is something of a concept album on the subject.

"It certainly wasn't meant to be a concept thing," Potvin says over the phone from his mother's Saskatoon home.

"But absolutely, you stand back and say, 'How one-dimensional of me.' "And such juicy lyrics: "She screams and yells; it scares the hell out of me. Three years ago, models of love and civility." (From Read Between the Lines, the leadoff single.)

Much of the album betrays Potvin's Pikes past, sounding (as he describes it) "like a country and western group doing a Smiths song." But the yet-to-be-released second single -- Heaven Is What You Leave Behind -- is a slice of adult-contemporary heaven, with a slow, bassy groove and backing vocals from former Pursuit of Happiness singer Lesley Stanwick. It sounds more like the Philosopher Kings than the man who wrote She Ain't Pretty.

He was able to begin recording the material thanks to a January, 1999, buyout at his post-Pikes job, as an artist-and-repertoire staffer for Polygram (which was being bought by Seagram). He never quite felt he knew what he was doing in A&R anyway, and the buyout allowed him to pay the bills while he found his musical legs again.

"It felt like I was in charge again, like I knew what I was doing," Potvin says of returning to the studio. "I'm so happy to be back. I really am."

Which doesn't mean the album -- Potvin's first solo effort, which he financed himself -- came easily. Working with producer Terry Brown (Cutting Crew, Blue Rodeo, Moist), Potvin threw out three weeks' worth of vocal tracks when they weren't working, and Brown consistently pushed for better.

Potvin says he feels really good about Heartbreakthrough, but he left the studio a better musician than he entered it.

"I really feel like I could make a killer record now. I could make a record 10 times better than that one. I feel like I've just shaken the rust off."

In fact, he returns to the studio on Aug. 8, as the Northern Pikes reunite for another album. A successful mini-tour this spring convinced the band there's still a spark.

Potvin, who has lived in Toronto for nearly a decade, is back in his hometown with fellow Northern Pikes bassist Jay Semko, guitarist Merl Bryck and drummer Don Schmid, working out the new material in a Saskatoon church basement. (They'll take a brief break from the studio to tour Eastern Canada, mostly to raise funds for the studio session. Potvin calls the tour "Pike Aid."). Each of the band's songwriters brought five songs into the session (Schmid is the band's business manager). Because the band is no longer grasping for the "American brass ring," Potvin says, the stresses and fatigue that prompted the Pikes to split have gone.

Potvin says the band made a live album, Live, from the reunion tour -- it's available on the Pikes Web site, but the band isn't promoting it very aggressively. It sounds like a bootleg, Potvin says, and is mostly for diehard fans.

The new Pikes album will be produced by David Baxter, Potvin's co-writer on Heaven Is What You Leave Behind. (It was his pairing with Baxter at a 1996 songwriting workshop, where they wrote Heaven, that helped Potvin get his groove back.)

Potvin, who has remarried and now has two stepdaughters, sounds much happier than the songwriter behind the melancholy Heartbreakthrough. He hasn't talked to his ex, he admits, since the album came out. "I should call her up and give her a copy," he says, not sounding like he means it.

"There's nothing really nasty on it. I can't really care too much [what she thinks]. I suppose I care. I don't want to hurt anybody. But I gotta do what I gotta do."