B l u e P a r a d e - A S a r a h S l e a n F a n s i t e
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By Shawn Conner
Sarah Slean is in a good mood. The morning of our interview, the Pickering, Ontario-born singer-songwriter had just received the first copies of her first poetry-and-art collection, the self-published Ravens. And she's just gotten off the phone with her record company's marketing manager, who wants to buy 20 copies as a prize for contest winners. "That's a little money in the gas tank," says Slean, on the phone from her Toronto home. "Whoo-hoo!"
She's certainly in a better headspace than she was in the summer of 2003. Feeling her life spinning out of control, Slean sold her belongings, broke her lease, and loaded her piano in a truck. The singer fled for the countryside to hunker down in a cabin one-and-a-half hours from Ottawa, spending four months in isolation.
"I think at this age in particular you don't realize how much you've been collecting your identity by what other people are reflecting back at you," says Slean, now 27. "Even if it's what's reflected by your close friends or relatives. Then you come to a point where you go, 'Wait a second, I don't know who I am outside of those ideas they have.' "
Even the small degree of fame that followed from her three previous releases, including her 2002 Hawksley Workman�produced major label debut, Night Bugs, had an effect. People were eager not only to make assumptions but to publish them as well, notes Slean, and this sent her into a further spiral of panic.
"My energy was devoted to trying to make sure people had the right opinion of me," she says. "Then I thought 'This is retarded. I want to take all of this away so that whoever is real has a chance to put her head above the window and look around and go, "Is it safe for me to come out yet?"' And there she'd be, and I'd know what she'd look like finally."
Such rebirth-and-transformation imagery is integral to Day One, Slean's latest record. By turns grandly theatrical and wistfully subdued, the disc finds the singer shedding some of the ethereal, flighty trappings of Night Bugs for a more rhythmic, earthier approach. For instance, Slean has never sounded stronger and more determined than on "Lucky Me", a lean, soaring rocker built around jagged indie-rock power chords. And there's no mistaking the darkness in the record when the opening track, "Pilgrim", begins with Slean singing "A little blood and vomit on the car seat/And a tooth is sitting in my lap" over distorted guitar, grinding programmed beats, and emphatic strings.
"I chose 'Pilgrim' to go first because that was the first song I wrote up there in the cabin," says Slean, who opens for Ron Sexsmith at the Commodore on Tuesday (November 2). "Looking back, it seems I knew what I was doing when I wrote it. I knew I had some ugliness to contend with and I had to be brave enough to face it."
But some songs offset the fear and anxiety expressed in the other tracks. The optimism of the carnivalesque "Out in the Park", for instance, is as crucial to the record as its negative counterparts. "Out in the park, fight the war!" commands Slean. "What are your hearts and your wheelbarrows for?"
From the sounds of Day One, Slean's heart and wheelbarrow are ready for whatever life brings next.
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