Ron Sexsmith Video
August 10th, 2007
If there is a better songwriter right now than Ron Sexsmith, I’d like to hear him or her. Steve Earle put out a string of great albums after he got himself cleaned up, but lately he has been on too much of a mission. Even Steve is a Ron fan, he produced “Blue Boy”, Ron Sexsmith is almost more famous for his famous fans than his music.
Although I had already decided I needed a video from Veoh to complete my set, here are the results of a search for “Ron Sexsmith” without the quotations:
- DailyMotion.com 4 videos
- YouTube.com 114 videos
- Veoh 14 pages mostly about other people named “Ron”
Veoh needs a better search algorithm
Adding in the quotation marks yield but a single video on Veoh, but after all these years it wouldn’t play. But since I like Ron Sexsmith and I like the fact my old friend Kevin Moore left a comment on this post I’ll replace the video with a new one.
Rawnboy
There are official and unofficial Ron Sexsmith videos on YouTube which clearly won the online video hosting war at least initially in North America. Ron also took to uploading acoustic versions of songs on a channel that really deserves to be more popular. I chose a video from that channel.
Ron’s songs are often sad and beautiful too, but he is more of an optimist than Townes Van Zandt or even Neil Young. If you have thoughts on Ron or songwriter recommendations you can leave a comment below.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: The Arts and tagged: DailyMotion, Ron Sexsmith, Veoh, Video Clip, YouTube.
Townes did his best work when he was an unknown, but there are still great undiscovered Townes songs, unless you’re the most devoted completest. Neil’s latest work has left me wanting… “Harvest Moon” was a great album, “Unplugged” was great a lot of his early 90s revival stuff. I really liked “Greendale”, I thought it was a brilliant idea, even solo acoustic it works. Supposedly it will become a graphic novel now.
I just feel Ron has been so consistent, no weak tracks, even the second version of “Gold in them hills” isn’t that bad, I’m really forgiving of vocalist that have something to say. In my world Ron Sexsmith is someone who I go see live when he comes to town, collect his complete back catelogue, Coldplay is something someone else listens to. I don’t even know how to spell it. Is it two words or one? Do I capitalize the P? I had to look crap like that up. ;-)
I remember seeing Ron Sexsmith at the Grad Club at Queen’s back in the mid-90’s. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen people there – he was billed as an up and coming singer songwriter from St. Catherine’s – so my friend from St. Catherine’s wanted to check it out. He was really small potatoes then… I had only really heard “of” him. He was nothing special back then – you wouldn’t have been able to predict him to become one of Canada’s greatest songwriters. I appreciate him way more now. My favorite song has got to be Gold in them Hills from Cobblestone Runway. It’s all about hope. It was redone with Chris Martin from Coldplay but it’s terible… not because of Chris Martin either, because unlike Ron Sexsmith, Chris can actually sing. The reason is because of the electro-whip snare that’s thrown in to make it “hipper”… it’s gotta be one of the worst production decisions ever. It was good with just the piano rolling in the background.
Ron has a bunch of really good tunes… I’d give him another decade of song-writing before I lumped him in with Neil, Townes and Dylan – plus I’d like to see him evolve into something else musically and lyrically (I’d like to hear a tune like Neil Young’s “Piece of Crap”). He certainly can’t sing like those other great songwriters (he can carry a tune better than those guys but he sounds like a frog at times – he could probably do a killer version of Kermit’s “the Rainbow Connection”).
Ron also gets bonus points for rockin’ the Hobbit look before Lord of the Rings came out.