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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SARAH HAMPSON
Do you want something? Quick, make a list. And don't just list the Big Things you want to accomplish, like Live in France. Note down the smaller, everyday things. Skate at midnight. Remember my sister's birthday. Drink 50-year-old Scotch.
"I believe that lists are like you've sent a prayer off into the wind. I think they are heard or received by something."
Sarah Slean, a rising star on the Canadian music scene, in town to perform at the third annual Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame gala tomorrow night, says this from a dark corner in a bar in a Toronto hotel, her pale-moonlight skin glowing, her eyes wide and innocent. "It's just a reminder that life is short and there's so many things that you have to do."
Be prepared, because this belief is only the tip of Slean's spooky iceberg. A small, slight woman of 28 years, whose fourth alt-rock album, Day One, was nominated for a Juno last year, she is dressed completely in black with silvery Mary Jane shoes.
She has the appearance of a wood nymph, out of place somehow in the forest of Toronto's office towers, and not just because of her oversized eyes, blue as Earth's atmosphere. Her pointed, small face, like that of a shy deer, peeks out from behind a curtain of dark hair. Her statements poke through the skin of accepted thought like prophecies from another realm. As slippery as the sound of her name, she seems to move through the world, more spirit than body, clean as wind, barely here. Over lunch, she eats almost nothing.
Her music is reminiscent of Tori Amos: edgy, raw and angst-ridden, her voice ethereal, a female energy that vibrates with all the sorrow and joy of the world. There's a dirge-like quality to some of Slean's songs, which feel best listened to when you're in the mood for too many cigarettes, a sloppy ponytail and a shot of cheap gin. Its appeal is both emotional and intellectual.
Slean may be a young woman, but she is not writing about girlish things. She is concerned about the state of the world. "When another midnight comes to rest/ On the cheek of our sleeplessness/ All the crusaders will wake and dress/ Pull their flags from their pillowcase./ You could hear all of Eden hold its breath/ On this the anniversary of wonder's death," read the lyrics of When Another Midnight, one song on her latest album.
Her preoccupation is all philosophical. Ask her anything, and she delivers an impassioned response, as though she has spent hours thinking about it. Which she likely has. "It occurred to me over the last two years that life is a process of sort of unpeeling who you are and becoming something, rather than figuring out what you are supposed to be," she tells me, apropos of nothing, at the start of our conversation.
Ask her about her training in classical music (both at Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music and for a year at York University), and she delivers an instant poem. "It's like a crystal lattice and the way that atoms organize themselves," she says, leaning forward. "Music is science."
And pianos? "They are fascinating things," she says, her little bony hands clutching at the air. "I couldn't possibly look at one as a piece of furniture, because it's a big enough instrument to command attention. If it's in the room, you're aware that it's there, like seeing someone out of the corner of your eye," she says, rolling her eyes to her left for effect. "Even if you don't know how to play, you know that it's this huge vault of potential, and I felt that from a very young age."
Slean grew up in one of those soulless subdivisions, out in Pickering, east of Toronto, in a cookie-cutter house, the middle of three children. Her father was a teacher; her mother stayed at home. Slean never quite felt she belonged. "I was the black sheep of the family," she says, adding that her siblings, an older brother and a younger sister, were tall and athletic, and tanned easily, whereas she was pale and small.
No one else was musical.
But there was an upright piano in the living room -- "It was a piece of furniture for housewives to play music on" -- and she felt drawn to it and to the woman, her great aunt Peg, who had owned it but who had suffered an unfulfilled life and died in her forties.
"Her energy, her vibes were inside this piano!" Slean cries. "I could feel it! It was like this thing glowed with 'Please use me!' "
Think Slean seems a bit kooky? Well, you are probably old. Well off. Satisfied with how you've succeeded. Hardened with cynicism born of experience. Or maybe you've just lost your wonder for the world. Talking to Slean, who also paints and writes poetry, reminds one of the innocence and hope of youth, and inspires, if nothing else, a desire to protect its fragility. "I want to populate the world with all of the beauty I possibly can," she says.
It is her determined wonder for the universe that runs through her thoughts. "Magic in my life happens all the time," she offers. "If wind twirls in the gutter in the most graceful, organized way, sometimes it takes my breath away."
I say that hers is a determined wonder because she has lost it a few times.
Day One was written after spending four months in an isolated cabin outside of Ottawa, where she had retreated in 2003 in the grip of depression, "a dark time" that she says had its own beauty.
"I just could feel sorrow in the world," she explains, sliding her eyes to look out the window onto the busy street, "because of the [Iraq] war," she muses, "and it seemed homelessness in Toronto was so much more visible, and maybe I was reading too many newspapers. So I started thinking, 'So what is it I do again? I sing songs?' And being in the whole sphere of this industry and its madness, and it's so driven by vanity," she continues, almost hissing the word. She stops mid-sentence, sighs.
"It can be so shallow, and I would think about all the money spent on stupid things," she says, shaking her head slightly. "I just started to feel ineffectual in the world."
She was also finding performing difficult. "Glenn Gould used to say that an audience was a force of evil, and that playing in front of an audience was blood sport -- that they're just waiting for you to screw up. I was retreating from that because it feels emotionally and spiritually dangerous to take your raw self and show it regularly."
She considered giving up music and entering the Peace Corps, among other possibilities, she confesses. But she realized, alone in the woods, that it was music that still drew her like a magnet, and that she should pay attention to the attraction. She also feels that music can heal.
"It's a force of good. But I'm not naive enough to think that you could have a Live 8 concert and fix famine. Change has to be on an individual level. I'm so fond of Gandhi for saying, 'Be the change you wish to see in others.' I can't connect the problems with a solution. I wish I could. I wish one individual could do that. I have to do my little thing and hope it's enough."
There's one more thing you should know about Slean, but I've kept it until now, near the end, after you've had a chance to hear how she thinks. To understand it, you have to be willing to suspend bourgeois judgment. Ready?
Slean divides up the space in her head for different personalities, all women at this point, who each contribute to her life. There's Emily, a.k.a. the Baroness, who has wild blue hair and often wears a red dress. She's the one who goes onstage. "A lot of what I'm singing about is larger than life, and it requires courage I don't always have," Slean explains.
Then there's Margaret. "She's the little librarian in me. She wears glasses and a pencil skirt, and she's very polite. Often she's the one who is painting or writing."
And there's Cookie, the crime photographer. "I came up with this one because I thought the profession of a crime photographer is very much like what I do when I'm making songs -- collecting aftermath and sort of filing it and putting it away for posterity."
Digest that for a moment, and while you're doing that -- wondering whether the way you see the world is too, well, traditional -- consider this. Remember that list idea? Guess where Slean is off to in a couple of weeks to live? Paris. There, she will write her next album, tentatively called The Baroness. "Since I've been about 15, my list has included 'Live in France,' and now, years later, it's coming true," Slean says, sparkling quietly in her corner.
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