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Journal Archives

Sarah's Journal

Track by Track - "Dress Rehearsal Rag"

Thursday, May 28, 2009

We recorded this song first - about three takes or so.  John then advised us to move on... which was wise.  I can't get too far into this mentality or it starts to swallow me.
The lyrics lean heavily on a very deep, old bruise in the human psyche.  Anyone who barely made it out of their twenties can relate. I think this arrangement is particularly strong (and I'm happy to have met Jim McGrath, humble and brilliant man that he is).  The text stanzas alternate moods:  between wistful reverie and the agony of regret and self-loathing. You can feel these changes musically.  The cold hard "reality" stanzas get tougher and more unbearable as the song goes on...

Track by Track - "Monarch"

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

I love the pictures in this song. When the monarch lays down her "jeweled head" I see the twinkling gems in her crown and brocade garments - her closing eyelids amidst a field of poppies and the bright fuschias of sunset.  When the tempo reappears we are suddenly swooping and diving above those fields -  skipping, mythically large, a folk tale come to life! ... The arrangement captures this wonderfully with sparkling piano and a hovering mist of string harmonics.

Track by Track - "Eyes Are the Flowers"

Thursday, May 21, 2009

It was hard to pick just one song from John Southworth's latest album.  This one captures what I think is his greatest strength - his very particular narrative take. John tells a story on such a different plane than most other songwriters. It's gentle and whimsical and image-filled, like a bed time story, but has the cryptic, mythological potency of an ancient religious text... 

Track by Track - "Dandelion Wine"

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

When I toured Canada and Europe with Ron Sexsmith and his band in 2004, I learned this album in intimate detail. This song in particular stood out... the casual treatment of such a painful regret. Bravo to Andrew for some very fluid and musical scale passages on the piano.  And Bravo also to Rob Piltch, whose sense of time I have not yet seen equalled in another musician.  Bravo again to Johnny Johnson whose ease and spontaneity made one think HE was the instrument...

Track by Track - "To Cry About"

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The opening cello kills me.  It sounds like forced nonchalance - a sloppy, slightly drunk effort to convince the ex-lover that you've moved on.

Mary Margaret O'Hara's "Miss America" is a favourite in my vinyl collection.  "You're in my heart, I'm in your hand"... Such a perfect little couplet. The inequality  of it!  Something we all must feel in order to become fully human. Oh! I remember this sting - when I was 13 watching Les Miserables on stage aching for poor Eponine and the unrequited love she sang of -  I knew, somehow knew, what this pain was all about even at 13... This knowledge makes you beautiful, makes you holy. Treasure it.

The space in this arrangement, the  broken-ness, the chromatic melting, it all makes this character three dimensional. And Johnny's saxophone solo... such delicious dirt!  The dissolution, the weary desire!  And eventually, the unravelling.  And then there is the beauty and perfection of the last chord. Sigh.

Track by Track - "Lode Star"

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

In the last year of the 1990s, I remember being in some crappy bar in Kelowna BC (or was it somewhere in Massachusetts? Ah, it's all a blur) with Sarah Harmer and Oh Susanna - and when Sarah played this song the whole lousy beer-smelling room was transformed into a navy blue lake with a dome of stars overhead.  Oh Susanna's "Alabaster" and other  tunes from Johnstown had similar transformational powers (perhaps for the next Art of Time Songbook?) The Ensemble really becomes a living breathing animal in this arrangement... chunky growls from the bass and thick, bow-heavy strings make for a meaty, thrusting chorus... Its open, spacious moments are particularly beautiful - reminiscent of Talk Talk's better days.

Track by Track - "I'll Never Tear You Apart"

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Snow-covered field full of skeleton trees. Winter twilight.  A crow's flight. The vast frozen lake.  Crisp, silent cold.... and....

GO!

This song is a jewel.  I was itching to sing it - and I could sing it a thousand times and never be happy with the take ... Martin Tielli's songs are very much his, and exist most fully in his voice. Minds like Martin Tielli's and Jonathan Goldsmith's should combine more often. The rhythm of this arrangement is pure genius to my ear. Like Radiohead's "Backdrifts", there is something about it that leaps out of reality and into timelessness - something that speaks to the body in a way that consciousness won't ever understand.  It speaks to the cells, and the cells obey.  I'm speed-skating across dark space...  the moon is reflected in the sweat of my brow, the fireflies are watching expectantly...
 
The soprano sax solo in this arrangement has redeemed the instrument for me. In the effervescent instrumental sections I see wind yanking a young tree --graceful, intense, flowing, wild, seemingly random yet disturbingly beautiful...The lowest bass note falling on beat four was difficult to feel at first (so contrary to my Mozartian inheritance) but once I entered the world of this trembling, frothy rhythmic idea, the whole ensemble came to life... Now it hijacks me... Surges and soars...  The end of this song - a still point on the tonic - is a sudden revelation every time.

Track by Track - "Black Flowers"

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

I don't remember when I first heard this song, but it was a very long time ago.  It was a full four minutes of goosebumps - and after probably ten years, never once hearing it performed again -  I could still remember the entire tune.  If THAT isn't the sign of a good song I don't know what is.  Picture a coal miner's widow rocking her child to sleep on the night of a violent storm, thinking on the terrible irony of the undertaker's "clean blue shirt and soft pink hands"  And this song is just the tip of the Lynn Miles iceberg.  She is so, so good.

Initially we all felt like this take was too slow, but when we compared the character of this narrator with others, the voice in this take was more real and alive, fragile, and laden with weariness.  I found it difficult to sing the whole thing without falling apart - it gets right inside my heart and brings tears to my eyes.  Ben's violin positively weeps in this opening. In the instrumental part, I see a small band of gypsy musicians following a coffin on a country road, mid-winter... the widow carries her baby and the wind blows... Blue, white and black.

Track by Track - "Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye"

Thursday, April 30, 2009

I first heard this song on Roberta Flack's "First Take" - one of my top twenty albums of all time.
I discovered many Cohen songs this way - through other performers -  but no matter who is at the microphone the brutal truthfulness of his poetic voice shines through.  That voice was irresistible to me in my youth - the way that Radiohead's aesthetic was - a kind of Promethean flame that simultaneously thrills and burns - inspires and yet crushes a new artist.  It's tough to continue writing when you know there is a man like Leonard Cohen sitting around in his backyard, smoking and thinking.  But you go on because so much of what he writes about you feel so vividly in your own heart, and that must mean that we're all each other in some fundamental way. "In city and in forest, they smiled like me and you."  Gavin Bryars' arrangement sighs and lolls like lovers in morning-warmed bedsheets....

The Art of Time Ensemble featuring Sarah Slean, Black Flowers

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Recording this album was a new approach for me - a freeing and frightening experiment with trust.  For the arrangements to really soar everyone needed to hear everyone else in real time, so we had to record full takes together in one room, instead of building separate layers on top of a bed drum or piano track (the method I'm used to).  And because we were recording to two-inch tape there was no chance of fixing flaws in Pro-Tools land - an uncomfortable fact  for my ear, which detects every flat/sharp deviation and cringes... Only my vocal and the guitar were isolated in booths, but a significant amount of sound leakage meant that editing those tracks was also not an option.  Every performance must be its own bald truth, no erasies.  No added plug ins, extras or effects.  Just air through lungs and strings vibrating. Wow. Scary.

Plus - no click track was used, so tempo had to come from whence it originally sprang - our pumping hearts.  How contrary to the music-making of today's mainstream!  Naturally, recording this way means some of the best performances are lost, and none of the chosen are perfect.  But it also means that magical and moving real-time synchronicities can be captured - moments that would never have occurred had we not been in such charged, time-dependent proximity to each other. 

This experiment forced me to love inaccuracy.  We can forget this kind of beauty when chasing the dangling carrot of perfection.... But isn't "perfection" merely an abstract idea? I myself have been hypnotized by the pursuit the Ideal, and not just in the art-making realm... 

This, if I may wax philosophical, is due to the way human brains work, and is our tragic (albeit fruitful) burden to bear.  Our cognitive machines are designed to manage chaos into tidy generalizations. Thus the abundant, unordered information of life is organized into "categories" and "concepts" - neither of which exist in any real sense.  What follows from that though, is that everything here and now is considered just a shadow, a mere approximation of the pure, ideal categories.  What's sad about this generalizing tendency is that it devalues the messy, staggering diversity of the Real, constantly reaching beyond here, beyond now - beyond a flawed vocal take to some "vocal-take-in-the-sky"... the world of Ideals.  That's why we dream of forevers - God, love, meaning, etc.,  - we are always skirting or failing to meet the fact - the pure fact! - of existence: ceaseless change.   I suspect this is why the lives of thinking human beings have that ever-present undercurrent of longing... Ahhh. I know it well. 

“A darkened theatre, sumptuous costumes, beautiful voices and an age-old tale of ambition, lust and murder? I’m in.”

Friday, April 24, 2009

Take some Shakespearian themes, a lusty Roman emperor, and an ambitious fox - add a misunderstood philosopher, a comic Nurse and of course a hapless, conflicted macho buffoon. Sounds like a party!

Michael Maniaci, whose every gesture aptly displayed the arrogance and pride of his character, sang so marvelously that at times I believed I was back in the era of Farinelli swooning in awe at the real thing. No wonder those male sopranos were superstars - truly faint-worthy, breath-taking heights!

Dizzying indeed, and countered by the stirring lows of Reason itself, the philosopher Seneca. Seneca O Seneca. If only virtue were sufficient for happiness! In the land of opera, the just and wise always get the axe. Sigh. Also delightful was Cynthia Smithers, the spritely, Love god of clear and pure voice, whose first descent from the heavens made my jaw drop-”Hey, isn’t that girl in my Harmonic Analysis class?”

While Poppea was lovely in the first half, her voice became even warmer and more agile in the second half and her closing duet with Nero was absolutely exquisite.

Bravo to Tafelmusik and a superb men’s choir for so skillfully completing the illusion…

Sarah Slean

Visit Opera Atelie now.

Do I hear a chorus of angels?

Thursday, April 23, 2009

How can there be any clearly discernible music in this head of mine, jammed as it is with the cacophony of a whole term's worth of  3rd year Harmonic Analysis? But I can indeed hear them - glorious celestial voices rising together in heavenly chorus... I AM DONE! Last exam completed at 12pm today.  Having resisted the urge to moon the Faculty of Music, I am officially, totally done! The proud owner of a university degree that took ten years to earn, bit by teeny bit! Hallelujah!  The sunshine, the new flowers, the delicious pain of the breaking buds! If you're looking for me, I'll be weeping in a Toronto park, drunk and high on life, O life!

xx
S

Hello Blogosphere.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Ground

It's here - the mud smell. Soccer fields, trees shuddering and shaking off a deep fog.  "April is the cruelest month" Eliot wrote.
Stuffy old codger! Life surges forth, despite everything.  The clean rooms of his mind might object to all the gooiness, the muck, the birthing slime, but I must remind him, there is more wisdom in one teaspoon of amniotic fluid than there is in the whole of his oeuvre.
 
And speaking of which, so much is new...
After much deliberation, I made some major decisions over the past month.
I am officially an independent artist again, in several ways.
I feel.... new. And slightly crazy.

In the middle of the maelstrom, someone sent me this Anais Nin quote:
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
That was the clincher. I cried and paced and couldn't sleep. Then I wrote some long emails.

I now feel as though, for the first time in a truly authentic way, I am the master of my own destiny.
No one to blame or require or lean on. Freedom and the awesome responsibility it demands...
Fighting the urge to run away to the woods...

The Green Party

After listening to the joke-of-a-federal-budget I moped to class in a stupour. Seriously - nuclear power? Rrrright. That sounds pretty eco-friendly. Let's see, what else, how about some roads? Yea, infrastructure, roads! Lots of cars need lots of roads!  I wish I was oversimplifying.  To pour salt on the wound, Ignatieff, with much blustery fanfare, says he will demand to see the books every few months! Take that Stephen!

Wasn't the plan a few months earlier to kick the Conservatives out? It's like Coronation Street for crying out loud, I can't keep track anymore!
Instead of getting my skirts in a knot I went to the Green Party web site for some inspiration. And lo and behold, inspiration was found!
With all the shenanigans in Parliament and the grim state of our environment I'm amazed these people have such a sense of humour.
And hope! Hope is far and away our most precious resource.  Sometimes I feel like I've got to plant some of mine in various places so it won't die - and today I planted some in the Green Party. Take my little monthly contribution Elizabeth! Run with it!So much is changing...

In its magnificent choreography, the universe masterfully aligned all of this change with "Canada Reads"...

Shut up about the Book Already!

Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards found me, sliced my heart open and begged me to hear its burning questions.

Yes. I wrote a long entry on the public Canada Reads site forum. I decorated my copy of the book with dozens of sticky flags and laboured over quotes and passages and points. Ugh. Will it matter? - probably not. It is not a pleasant read. It's infuriating and tragic and painful. Why did it change me? Because it forced me to acknowledge that our lives are hilariously meaningless unless we consider them in terms beyond our individual selves. T. S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent and Tolstoy's Confession, say the same thing - that for a temporal existence to escape absurdity, it must consider and define its relation to the infinite. We can't ignore this consideration - it's impossible, it is our burden and blessing as conscious organisms. (I'm reminded of Camus' notion that the only relevant philosophical problem is suicide...)

But what does that really mean, to consider our relation to the infinite? This puzzle has gripped me for a decade. In Mercy, the main character Sydney chooses to define his relationship to the infinite and lives by this definition, even when it becomes unbearably difficult to do so.  In that alone I see such tremendous nobility! Most of us continually refine our sense of truth to accommodate the situation we're in!  It was the strength of Sydney's faith in a truth that moved me - in fact I felt a kind of envy... I must stop here because you're going to run out to read the book, right? But allow me to mention that T. S. Eliot, while writing The Waste Land, seriously considered becoming a Buddhist... He later converted to Anglo-Catholicism... (Also useful to note: Nietszche, as you know, went mad.) I digress. Anyway. Why Sydney as a character stuck with me is because although the meaning of life, if there is one, is likely unknowable, I think everyone believes deeply that it has something to do with our mysterious power to feel empathy and compassionate love . It has something to do with fully grasping your transience and mortality in a way that expands and frees these capacities.

I'm not exactly looking forward to the debate, because I feel like what this novel has to say is something that can only be felt. (What was it Elvis Costello said? "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.") I'm also thinking that everyone is going to attack the book.  Someone said to me that Mercy Among the Children had "the least delight" of all the selections, which I thought was blatantly untrue on a textual level, but also quite a dangerous statement to make on another all-too-important level - pertaining to the function of art. Since when is art a vacation? I'm not saying great literature has to be dark and depressing, but it should at least make you think - and think about human existence - no?

I really believe that art is not fantasy or a place to hide. It must not distract us from the world. Sheesh, we have drugs and booze if blindness is what we willfully seek. And that's just the chemical shortlist - we are all familiar with the myriad time-filling mind-numbing opiates that the modern world offers.  But art is supposed to penetrate our despair and confusion and deliver us to some kind of truth - a kind of beauty (I'm as unclear as Keats on a distinction here!). How then is it different than journalism in one sense or religion in the other, you ask? Because art's magic trick is its use of wonderment, that special sight that we were all born with but sort of falls asleep as we age - a sight beyond consciousness and the self, or perhaps before them. A sight that is never clogged with words or labels.  That's why the truth that art delivers can't be written down in factual statements, it has to be experienced, journeyed through. It's a knowing that knowing can't grasp.  You can't say "this novel means this," "this symphony means this" - you have to read it, you have to hear it, you have to  be a living, struggling, truth-hungry human. And then, as Helen Keller said, it is "felt with the heart".

Sigh. It's late.
I baked a carrot cake tonight.
Ah, they were precious, those minutes outside of my head, stirring batter!

Sleep well, good reader.
Night is with us.
The rain sighs and dwindles. The trains rattle.
My fingers... typing... this page.

But wait!

JUNOS

So thrilled, so honoured, so shocked.
Thank you...(cursty)

xxx
S