This article is something else.
quote:
Drama queen
Ethereal singer Sarah Slean gets real — sort of
By Sarah Liss, CBCNews.ca
March 19, 2008
Sarah Slean has sung in the voice of countless characters. Since releasing her first recording (the cassette EP Universe) in 1997, the Toronto singer/songwriter has imagined herself gambling with the traitor Judas, on the lam with J.D. Salinger and wandering fin-de-siècle Paris in the worn-out slippers of a French waif named Emily. She transformed herself into Beamsville, Ont., murderess Evelyn Dick for the noirish musical Black Widow in 2005 (based on Dick’s real-life crimes) and on the flopped FOX mystery game show Murder in Small Town X, Slean had a bit part as a trashy piano player in the shadows of a dingy local bar.
A classically trained vocalist and pianist given to rococo flourishes and flights of fancy, Slean has been known to preface her live performances with anecdotes about the vivid dreams that inspired particular songs. (I can still remember her recounting a sleepy-time journey with Salinger when she played Toronto’s C’est What almost a decade ago.)
But on her latest album, The Baroness, the 30-year-old Slean did something out of character: she consciously wrote in her own voice. On the song No Place At All, she gazes wistfully at “friends of mine all moving on / Getting comfortable cars / Getting married.” On the penultimate track, Shadowlands, she throws open the doors of her closet to air the skeletons of her addictions; the first verse lists personal demons like anorexia and alcohol.
In the past, her theatrics have conveyed a frenetic, anxious energy; on occasion, I’ve found her live shows almost uncomfortable to sit through. For Slean to strip away that bravado and present something closer to her everyday self was clearly a monumental challenge.
“I’m really scared. I’m really scared,” murmurs the fragile, wide-eyed singer in a recent interview — moments after letting out a blood-curdling screech. (Thankfully, we were in an enclosed hotel suite with good soundproofing.) Sporting a shimmery, electric-blue dress better suited to a gallery opening than a grueling day of media at Canadian Music Week, Slean seems both more grounded and more nervous than in previous encounters.
I’ve interviewed the Aurora, Ont. native on several occasions and seen her perform at least half a dozen times, and I’ve never seen her this clear-headed. Nor have I seen her break the swooning, ethereal-chanteuse façade she’s worked so hard to muster. (One music industry exec suggested she’s spent her career trying to channel Edith Piaf.)
“I have a showcase in New York coming up,” Slean says, “and I had my first rehearsal with a new band. When I went into it, I was really, really scared. And I’m not normally scared. It’s a whole other level of openness that is frightening.”
Make no mistake: The Baroness is no bare-bones collection of confessionals. Slean, who has collaborated with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and classical fusionists the Art of Time Ensemble, still indulges her proclivity for swooping strings and soaring vocals. And for every lyric that draws a straight through-line to her current state of mind, you’ll find a poetic allusion. The spare Notes from the Underground, which opens with a strummed acoustic guitar, borrows from Dostoyevsky to paint Slean and her fellow “exiles in the kingdom” as “mice who must write our lives down.” The violin-laced Sound of Water/Change Your Mind — which Slean claims was her attempt “to write an anthem, because I was feeling cynical” — talks about the “ravenous mouth” of pain and imagines Slean as “a glittering queen” bathed in “magnificent green” light.
Clearly, Slean hasn’t shrugged off all elements of theatricality. She explains that the title of The Baroness was inspired in part by her imagined self: “25 times me, super-saturated,” clad in a gown, carrying “a bunch of arrows and a sword.”
“But,” she adds, “it’s also bareness… barrenness. It’s a bit of a twist, or an ironic title, I guess, 'cause this music is, more than anything I’ve ever put to tape, just the truth. I’m getting to the point where I realize I’ve talked a big game about telling the Red Hot Truth all the time, about being a truth warrior, but I think I was kind of … 20s-style misguided. When you’re in your 20s, you feel as though you have to stand on a mountaintop and scream everything, and truth is more elusive than that. To tell this story of all these songs, thank God [co-producer] Jag [Tanna] was around, 'cause I had this urge, this nervous urge. The words came out, and they were so bloody and so raw, and I was like .…” Slean puts her hands to her face and gasps, “‘The Truth!’ It was terrifying to look at.”
Sarah Slean performs during the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame Gala in Toronto in 2005. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)
Sarah Slean performs during the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame Gala in Toronto in 2005. (Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)
I could try to decode Slean’s language, but it’s probably best just to let her go on.
“My instincts were to put a dress on it and sleigh bells and maybe some pom-poms. And Jag was like, ‘Wait, just listen to it for a week. What you’re telling with your voice, this sentiment, is what the song should be about. It shouldn’t be about the other ingredients you’re nervously piling on it to sorta hide it.’ I realized he was right. But it’s hard to do that.”
Indeed, The Baroness is quite forthright emotionally when compared with the heady cabaret pop of her 2002 album, Night Bugs, and the manic, alternative-rock bombast of 2004’s disappointing Day One. Vocally, though, Slean veers away from her operatic put-ons in favour of a more intimate delivery. Producer Hawksley Workman (who oversaw Night Bugs) jacked Slean’s romantic tendencies up to stratospheric heights while Tanna — who’s best known as the guitarist for ’90s Canadian alterna-rockers I Mother Earth — appears to have managed the impossible: he coaxed her into calming down. When she talks about their recording sessions, it’s in the language of therapy, with allusions to “safe spaces” and feeling “healthy.”
Tanna can’t take all the credit for bringing Slean back down to earth. When she returned from Paris in 2006, after nine months abroad, she decided to go back to school. When she was signed, back in the late ’90s, it was midway through her post-secondary studies in music and philosophy, so she never quite finished her B.A. “When I got back from Paris and was spending the year writing and recording and stuff, I thought, ‘I know myself. If I’m inside my apartment for long periods of time, I will go nuts.’ I knew I needed to occupy my brain.”
Her university career has been a bit discombobulating. In addition to the unnerving experience of attending school alongside kids a decade younger than herself, Slean has a semi-famous face. The singer sheepishly admits that she gets noticed. “One girl turned to me with a strange look on her face and said, ‘Wait a second, I saw you on ET Canada the other day,’” Slean moans. “I was like, ‘Shhhh!’”
You have to wonder if Slean is laying herself bare in a kind of last-ditch strategic manoeuvre. The same industry exec who alluded to Slean’s Piaf pretensions wondered whether The Baroness would finally, hopefully, be the breakout album the singer and her label have been hoping for. When Warner signed Slean a decade ago, both industry and media types envisioned the piano prodigy as a Canadian version of Tori Amos, the faerie-referencing songstress who now lives in a palatial English estate. That promise was never quite realized. Amos laid the groundwork for her quirky, fantastical work with intensely autobiographical material (Me and A Gun is a real-life account of being raped) before detouring into wackier territory. Slean, by contrast, started out arty, and only got weirder.
The Baroness is easily the most accessible album Slean has made. The lead single, Get Home, is a ponderous piano ballad reminiscent of Sarah McLachlan’s Adia; it’s currently near the top of the iTunes charts. And though it may sound crass, the meaty personal details that Slean hints at in her newest songs are more compelling than the flights of whimsy that have defined her thus far. Whether The Baroness succeeds depends on how convincingly she pulls off this new role.
The Baroness is in stores now.
Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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