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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Singer comes out of hiding with new CD Day One By STEPHEN COOKE / Entertainment Reporter
FOR TORONTO singer-songwriter Sarah Slean, musical and visual inspiration tend to blur together. Her new CD Day One is a collage of arresting sounds and images chronicling a spiritual awakening, with songs about dark night visions and her paintings of crawling angels in the booklet taking the listener on a dreamlike journey.
By the end, Slean has set fire to the small house containing all her fears and anxieties, and is depicted on the insert making her way towards a golden metropolis similar to Oz's Emerald City.
You can hear Slean describe her personal voyage of the psyche herself when she joins Ron Sexsmith and Nathan Wiley in concert tonight at the Chester Playhouse, Liverpool's Astor Theatre on Friday and the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium in Halifax on Saturday. Tickets are $27.50 in advance, $35 day of show, taxes included.
"The music was coming from the darkest place I had ever known," says the blue-eyed brunette, who worked with co-producers Peter Prilesnik and Dan Kurtz to create a stirring mix of balladry and alternative cabaret. "I lived in a cabin for four months because I'd had an utter collapse in my faith in . . . I don't know what happened, but my vision turned grey and refused to go back.
"I felt like I was losing my mind, honestly, and I looked at my life and thought that I could either stay here and keep thinking the way I was thinking - observing the world the way I was, I thought I would die - or I could stop it right now. My friends and my family and the label all wondered what I was doing, but I put my piano in the back of a truck, gave away most of my belongings, and I went to this woman's guest house. There I was in this room with a grand piano and an electric frying pan, and that was about it."
While cooking "very boring things" on her lone utensil - steamed potatoes and fish, beans and broccoli - Slean set herself to creating more exciting concoctions on her piano and exorcising demons of the past year, like an unrequited love for someone already engaged, chronicled in the song California.
She was tempted to call the album Orphan Music, to describe how she felt cut off from the world, learning to cope for the first time on her own, but she settled on the more hopeful Day One, after a joyous title track about waking up and "spreading love like a terrorist"
"I was peeling back all these layers of myself; layers of untruths, fear, insecurity, and all that stuff," she says. "I just wanted to see what was in there and make the pain go away. It turns out the Sarah that was in there just wanted to play piano and paint pictures all day, and I thought, 'Hey man, that's better than flying a fighter plane or selling weapons to Third World countries.'
"I consider myself a revolutionary in that aspect; artists have to be revolutionaries, and the revolution-in the face of all this madness and destruction-is to try and continue to create beautiful things."
Singer-songwriter Sarah Slean resets her calendar to Day One, at a series of shows with Ron Sexsmith tonight at the Chester Playhouse, Friday at Liverpool's Astor Theatre and Saturday at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium in Halifax.
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