Whether it’s alone in a cabin with an acoustic guitar and an album’s worth of songs (Rare Birds), a highway-heavy head-trip with a fierce indie rock band backing him (Wildfires and Crimes), or writing punk rock bangers over the course of two overseas tours in 2010, Ryder Havdale has taken both himself and his ever-changing companions of The Mohawk Lodge on wild and sometimes unexpected musical rides. The story leading up to the record he’s presently finishing under the Mohawk Lodge moniker, Damaged Goods, is no exception.

Damaged Goods was conceived somewhere on a highway in the middle of Europe, on a December tour in support of 2010’s Crimes. The weather was freezing and home was thousands of miles away. After returning to Canada, Havdale holed himself up in a remote British Columbia cabin with a sixteen-track recorder and began writing an albums’ worth of songs about lost love and life on the road. Now back in Toronto, Havdale enlisted the help of both current and past members of the Mohawk Lodge’s live lineup and pieced the record together track by track at the label headquarters.

Because of this, Damaged Goods fits perfectly in The Mohawk Lodge canon, another autobiographical soundtrack that changes players and sounds as Havdale changes cities and friends. A blurry mix of Bruce Springsteen, a teenage Swervedriver, a Repeater-era Fugazi and Neil Young circa Ragged Glory all come together in Damaged Goods, along with the raw, urgent atmosphere of early-nineties lo-fi rock and roll. Havdale’s mission is to involve and integrate every one he knows into his music: in doing so, he’s gone on some cataclysmic journeys, sometimes to the world outside, and sometimes inward towards himself. This is the music of one man’s disjointed route on the planet earth, and when focused into music, becomes one cathartic and epic voyage.