Blue Umbrella Releases Debut Album, Recklessly Yours, The Saskatchewan Folk Rock Supergroup 30 Years in the Making
Saskatoon folk rock outfit Blue Umbrella releases its debut album, ‘Recklessly Yours,’ out now on streaming platforms and vinyl. Led by singer-songwriter Ryan Meili, better known across Canada as a family doctor, public health advocate and former leader of the Saskatchewan NDP, the record blends 70s folk rock with the grit of 90s prairie bar bands, carrying the depth of perspective that comes from a genuinely well lived life.
The album’s story stretches back three decades, to when Meili first started writing songs and playing shows in his twenties. Medicine, a growing family and a career in public life kept a full album out of reach for years, until Meili turned 49 and decided the time had finally come. Drawing on skills honed building political campaigns, he brought together a rotating cast of longtime friends and accomplished musicians, organizing rehearsals and recording sessions the same way he once organized a nomination race: patiently, deliberately, and with a clear goal in mind.
That process produced “Ignorance,” the album’s first single, released in May of this year. A reflective, plainspoken meditation on innocence and self-forgiveness, the track has drawn comparisons to early Tragically Hip and REM from listeners, a connection Meili has said was never intentional but one he is more than happy to embrace. The recording features Meili on guitar and vocals alongside Tyson McShane on bass, Luke Ryalls on guitar, Sam Corbett on drums, Burke Barlow on pedal steel and Barrett Ross on organ.
The second single, “Tropical Storm,” released in June, shifts into more vivid, image-driven territory, using weather and vegetation as metaphors for growth that only comes through upheaval. The track’s warm, rhythmic groove is carried by the same core lineup, with Ellen Froese adding vocals to round out the arrangement, giving the song a lush, full band sound that mirrors its themes of pressure building toward release.
The album’s third single, “Laid Back,” is out now and finds Meili at his most self-deprecating, turning a wry, rapid fire character sketch into one of the record’s most purely enjoyable moments. Recorded with McShane, Ryalls, Froese and Barlow, alongside drummer Charles Lemire, the track captures the loose, confident chemistry that developed once the full band found its footing.
That chemistry comes from real experience. Corbett spent twenty years touring the world as drummer for the Sheepdogs before stepping behind the board to produce ‘Recklessly Yours,’ following earlier production work on Ellen Froese’s ‘For Each Flower Growing’ and his own acclaimed record, ‘NUTANA.’ McShane has built an international career fronting indie stalwarts Slow Down Molasses, while Ryalls previously led Saskatoon’s The Fjords and released his own solo album, ‘The City.’ Barlow, formerly of Deep Dark Woods, rounds out the lineup on pedal steel. The album also features a feature spot from rising songwriter Lachlan Neville and a non-political guest cello performance from Saskatchewan MLA Meara Conway, with Barrett Ross engineering and mixing the entire record at Rec Hall Studios in Saskatoon and mastering handled by João Carvalho.
Alongside ten original songs, ‘Recklessly Yours’ includes two deep cut Canadian covers, the Tragically Hip’s “We’ll Go Too” and Leonard Cohen’s “Old Revolution,” a nod to the tradition the band draws from most directly. The album’s title and band name both trace back to Meili’s own history, with Blue Umbrella borrowed from a 1975 John Prine song and the phrase “Recklessly Yours” a nod to chances taken and adventures lived. The album cover plays with that recklessness, using the found poetry of fortune cookie papers to evoke a playful approach to the mysteries of life’s many possible paths. The record has already earned feature segments on Global News, CTV Morning and CBC BlueSky and coveted booking at this year’s Saskatoon Jazz Festival.
Hi, Ryan! Good to meet you! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
Nice to meet you too! I’m a songwriter from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and I’ve just released my first album, Recklessly Yours with the band Blue Umbrella. The album consists of ten originals and two deep-cut Canadian covers.
The band is made up of talented and experienced musicians from Saskatoon. Sam Corbett on drums (Sheepdogs, NUTANA), Tyson McShane on bass (Slow Down Molasses), Luke Ryalls on lead guitar (Fjords), and Burke Barlow on pedal steel (Deep Dark Woods) make up the core group. They’re also all, like me, each fathers of two kids, which led one friend to refer to us as a “Saskatchewan-famous dad rock supergroup.”
We recorded the album with Barrett Ross at Rec Hall Studios in Saskatoon. He also played keys on the record, adding to contributions from Ellen Froese, Lachlan Neville, Charles Lemire and MLA Meara Conway.
We started playing together in fall of 2024 and worked around everyone’s professional and parental schedules to get the record made and ourselves performance ready.
You’ve spent decades as a doctor, a public health advocate, and a political leader, but these songs began long before any of those roles. Do you feel like this album is introducing people to the Ryan Meili you’ve always been?
A friend from my political years (I was the leader of the opposition in Saskatchewan from 2018-2022) came to our recent festival show in Saskatoon. Afterward she asked me if the songs were processing that time in politics. Even though most of them were written long before, different phases of life add new layers of meaning. So, I like to think I’ve always been the Ryan Meili I’ve always been, whether in medicine or music or public life, and yes, that guy is definitely in these tunes.
That said, there is a rediscovery here. While playing songs and performing are not new for me, I had put them aside for many years to focus on more “serious” things like raising kids and advancing my career. Finding the joy of making music with friends again and taking the step to share that music more widely through recording has definitely brought out a neglected side of who I’ve always wanted to be.
You say this record was 30 years in the making. Why was now the right time? What changed at 49 that perhaps couldn’t have happened at 29?
It’s above all the people I could bring together now. Each of the contributors to this record are people I’ve gotten to know from other lives and who came together for this project out of a shared love of making music. The involvement of all of these talented people made for richer arrangements , inspiration for new songs and new approaches to old ones.
It’s also true that the life lived between these songs being written and recorded adds depth to the interpretation. The oldest song on the album, Poor Fool’s Mind, was written in 2000 in Whitehorse. It was the lament of a young man who feels the world he’s finding his way in isn’t what it was meant to be. This version juxtaposes me, many more years into living that life, with a verse sung by young Saskatchewan singer-songwriter Lachlan Neville, giving different sightlines across that generational bridge.
You included songs by Leonard Cohen and The Tragically Hip alongside your own. What conversations do those songs have with the original material on Recklessly Yours?
Our sound can be described as folk rock, often referred to these days as Americana. And Blue Umbrella is named after a song by John Prine, one of the greatest American folk songwriters. Still, we are a truly Canadian outfit, shaped by the music and the history and the geography of this country, so I think we’re better described as Canadiana.
We were finalizing the songs for this record at the time that Donald Trump started talking about Canada as the 51st state. I had wanted to include a couple of covers on the record and decided to choose songs that might otherwise be overlooked in the catalogues of great Canadian artists. I landed on Old Revolution by Leonard Cohen and We’ll Go Too by the Tragically Hip because they are fun to play and because the 60s/70s folk and 90s bar band rock influences are so apparent in our sound.
The songs also ended up taking on different lives, with a folkier version of We’ll Go Too on the record and our live show including a heavier version of Old Revolution. The meanings changed too, at least for us, which is a sign of them being real poetry. They reflect the author’s experience, but they come to inhabit the stories of anyone who reads or performs them and have become as personal for me to perform as anything I’ve written myself.
The album is called Recklessly Yours, but it actually feels remarkably thoughtful and patient. What does “reckless” mean to you today, and has that definition changed over the course of your life?
The cover of the record features a fortune cookie with the band name and album title on the fortune paper. All around are fortunes collected over years and years, with the one just below the cookie reading, “You will continue to take chances and be glad that you did.” I have had the good fortune (no pun intended) to be able to live many lives: working in Africa, the inner-city and the Far North as a doctor, publishing books, leading in elected life, and now playing music. Learning new languages, new instruments, new ways of being, this always means leaving something behind, taking the risk that things will flop fantastically and being fine with that because it was fun to try.
There’s something particularly reckless about music. In politics and in medicine you have to choose your words so carefully. The same is true in songwriting, but in a totally different way. You’re free to play with words, to take on a character, to say things that are absurd or that you don’t really mean because they fit the song. You also make yourself vulnerable, risking rejection and ridicule because you feel like singing. I’m glad the songs come across as thoughtful, but it’s the playful I enjoy the most.