Kitchener, Ontario singer-songwriter Kevin Westphal, better known to Canadian audiences as The Canuck, releases “The Food Inflation Blues,” a country comedy track born out of a conversation that stuck with him longer than he expected. Standing in the checkout line, Kevin asked a store manager why prices kept climbing, and later that same night watched the news report record grocery store profits.
“I picked up my guitar and ‘The Food Inflation Blues’ just came out,” he said.
The song plays out almost like a short story set to a shuffle beat. Kevin walks the aisles cataloguing sticker shock.
Comedy has always had a particular power in protest songwriting precisely because it slips past the defenses a straightforwardly angry song runs into. Where outrage tends to preach to people who already agree, a funny lyric invites listeners to laugh first and catch what they’re laughing at second, the same trick songwriters like Randy Newman, Tom Lehrer, The Kinks’ Ray Davies, Warren Zevon, John Prine and Arlo Guthrie have leaned on for decades to make difficult subjects land without ever feeling preachy.
It is also a tradition Kevin came by honestly. His breakout song, “The Gas Song,” turned pump price frustration into a hit that spread across Canadian radio regardless of format in the early 2000s. Years later, a friend who played lead guitar for Stompin’ Tom Connors brought “The Gas Song” out on tour when gas prices spiked again, a connection that led to a real friendship between Kevin and the country legend and cemented his own reputation as one of the genre’s most reliable chroniclers of everyday Canadian frustration.
“The Food Inflation Blues” continues a catalogue that has, for close to 15 years, turned ordinary Canadian gripes into songs people instantly recognize, from “Here’s to Our Farmers” to “A Typical Day on the 401,” “The Barbershop Song” and “The Marijuana Song,” each one earning Kevin television, radio and online coverage across the country, including CTV News and London’s Country 104.
Kevin wrote and produced “The Food Inflation Blues” himself, recording at Fred Smith Studio in Kitchener with Fred Smith on lead guitar, Doug Dietrich on pedal steel, Don McDougall on drums and Paul Stouffer on keyboards, with Kevin himself on bass. The accompanying video was directed by Danny Bailey, assisted by Riley Harrison and filmed and edited by Inflorescence Bloom, with Grant Heywood on drums, Pete Harrison on upright bass and Paul Schultz playing the grocery manager opposite Westphal as The Canuck.
With “The Food Inflation Blues,” Kevin adds another chapter to a career built on turning what everybody is already grumbling about into something worth singing along to, proof that the funniest way to say something serious is often the one that sticks.