Henry Adam Svec’s newest project, Souwesto Gothic: The Case of the Talbot Trail Boys, marks a striking expansion of his long-running fascination with place, myth, and the cultural imagination of Southwestern Ontario—known locally, thanks to the late artist Greg Curnoe, as “Souwesto.” Drawing on the legacy of Curnoe and other regionalist storytellers such as James Reaney and Eudora Welty, Svec builds his own chapter in this creative lineage through sound, narrative, and performance. The six-part scripted podcast—just under three hours in total—follows a folklorist and song collector, played by Svec, who stumbles upon a mysterious 1993 alt-country album by a forgotten band called The Talbot Trail Boys at a yard sale near St. Thomas, Ontario. What begins as a simple investigation into the record’s origins evolves into a genre-bending blend of true-crime audio, musical biography, and rural noir. Recorded on location and featuring a stacked ensemble of actors and musicians including Misha Bower, WL Altman, Jonas Bonetta, Ron Leary, Evan Brodie, Erin Brandenburg, Jenny Berkel, and Nathan Lawr, the production anchors its storytelling in meticulous sound design, original music, and a sharply rendered sense of place. “I see The Case of the Talbot Trail Boys as only season one of Souwesto Gothic,” Svec says. “I’ve got several more stories in development—each set in and around Southwestern Ontario, each a mystery only a folklorist can solve.”
The project also extends the trademark mischievousness that has defined much of Svec’s interdisciplinary career. For years, he has played with the boundaries between fact and fabrication, crafting elaborate, multimedia hoaxes that probe how stories gain credibility. In The Boy From ET, he performed as Henry Thomas—the actor from Spielberg’s classic—who had supposedly moved to Canada to pursue songwriting. In The CFL Sessions, he took on the role of a folklorist uncovering lost recordings of 1970s Canadian football players. And in Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada, he claimed to have created an A.I. capable of generating “authentic” Canadian folk music. These projects, often accompanied by albums, websites, interviews, and even a fictionalized memoir—Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs (Invisible Publishing, 2021)—regularly fooled audiences and media outlets alike. With Souwesto Gothic, however, Svec chooses to be more transparent about the artifice. “Pulling off a hoax is sort of like doing a magic trick,” he says. “But I imagine many magicians would get tired if everyone just thought they had natural magical abilities.” For Svec, exposing the mechanics doesn’t diminish the wonder; instead, it invites listeners deeper into the performance. And in Souwesto Gothic, that mix of music, mythmaking, and carefully crafted illusion continues to thrive.
