JUST BEFORE HENRY SVEC stood up to sing in a Sackville, New Brunswick, bar last year, an elderly man approached him. “Make sure you turn up the vocals,” he said. “I really want to hear the lyrics.” He believed that Svec’s songs—off his latest album, The CFL Sessions—were written in the 1970s by real Canadian football players, recorded by Marxist folk song collector Staunton R. Livingson, then forgotten until Svec rediscovered them in the National Archives of Canada.

“It’s all a hoax,” Svec admits over the phone from New Brunswick, just an hour after his SappyFest performance last week. “If you have a guitar in your hand, people believe whatever you say.”

“Pure folk music is a global thing that transcends a border,” Svec says. “I like that idea… that a group of people can be authentic, that there is such thing as authentic experience, that you can capture that.”

Read all 600 words at The Coast. And know that The CFL Sessions are available for free download on his website. They’re not bad, actually.