http://www.vueweekly.com/articles/default.aspx?i=5208

SARAH SLEAN ADOPTS ORPHAN MUSIC
BRYAN BIRTLES / bryan@vueweekly.com


Best known for her dark, cabaret inspired songs, it may come as a small surprise that Sarah Slean hails not from a gritty urban mecca such as Montreal or New York City, but from quaint and picturesque Pickering, Ontario. As she explains, the boredom of the suburbs makes for its own tribulations.

“Every 14-year-old would say the same thing about their hometown,” she says. “Your mind is at its most fertile, and being somewhere like a small town where people just want to raise families, having a blooming mind is tantamount to starvation.”

To escape this starvation, Slean turned to music, but when that left her feeling somewhat empty she took a drastic measure. Moving to a small cabin outside of Ottawa to be alone for months, she rediscovered her artistic drive in order to make her previous disc, Day One.

“I had a major philosophical crisis,” she explains of the time period. “I subtracted a large portion of my life to find something meaningful; the coldness, the emptiness and the stillness of where I was turned down my panic. Once I stilled that panic what came out of that hole was a riot of joy.”
Her newest disc, entitled Orphan Music, is exactly what the title suggests: a collection of live performances and unreleased recordings that had no home.
“They are all the little birds I found by the side of the road,” Slean says of songs on the disc.

Unlike Day One, Orphan Music returns to the sparse sound that first brought Slean to prominence. This return to form comes from a realization of what her strengths are; Slean is a songwriter, but not a studio wizard.

“It was an experiment,” she says of Day One. “That’s always a problem. Because I’m an enthusiast, when I’m in a studio, I want to do everything a studio can do.”

Showgoers can expect the stripped down and hushed Sarah Slean when they take in her concert.

“Music begins in silence and ends in silence. That’s the way it is.” V

Sun, Nov 26 (7 pm)
Sarah Slean
With Christian Hansen
Myer Horowitz, $18 (all ages)

quote:

Showgoers can expect the stripped down and hushed Sarah Slean when they take in her concert.

So I take it she's not playing with a band or any strings on this tour?
I thought there was an outside chance she may have some support as she had a quartette for some of her France dates. It seemed fitting she would have them in support of this Orphan Music tour.

That being said, the solo and intimate shows are great because they don't have to abide to a real setlist.


Cameron