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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Kerry Gold
Sarah Slean had broken through with a critically acclaimed album, but she only wanted to flee.
The 27-year-old classically trained musician from Toronto earned much-deserved praise for her hauntingly lovely, piano-driven pop album, Night Bugs, and it seemed the universe had conspired to make her professional dreams a reality.
Slean responded by going deep into the woods and staying there for four months.
The forest was somewhere outside of Ottawa, where she stayed with only a piano and rodents for company, in a cabin a 20-minute drive from civilization. It was there that she embraced her fear, and a few glasses of whisky on the front porch, and developed the ideas for her fourth full-length and second major label album, Day One. She performs March 15 at Richard's on Richards.
Tremendously talented Slean is poised for fame, but to her fans, she'll always be the alternative artist, the one whose early EP featured a cover of Radiohead's Climbing Up the Walls. Her albums are not yet released in the States, with her sights so far more focused on the art-savvy European markets. She feels a kinship with Europeans, she says, and so did her former co-producer Hawksley Workman, who shares a similar conviction for the beautifully unique.
Day One has earned Slean her a Juno nomination in the new adult alternative category, in the formidable company of Sarah Harmer, Matt Mays, Rufus Wainwright and Ron Sexsmith.
The names in that category have convinced her that it's good to be a Canadian songwriter again.
"We have Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Bruce Cockburn all of these great writers. And there is that era of the super groups and the major superstars who weren't necessarily known for that. It was more the Celine [Dion] thing that we have going on right now.
"But it makes me happy that the writing and the craft and the attention to detail is being rewarded again."
Slean's attention to detail required self-imposed isolation, a reaction to her state of mind back in the summer of 2003.
"All of my prior, go-to mental structures, the ones that allow me to make sense of what is a chaotic and senseless world, they all kind of didn't work any more," she recalls.
"I just came to a point where I was almost literally experiencing the nausea in [Jean-Paul] Sartre's novel, where everything just seemed grotesque and funny and meaningless. And I really couldn't get myself out of that. I couldn't shake it, it was bizarre."
To rid herself of the chaos of "the video game" of daily life, she had no choice but to cast off her worldly possessions and go it alone.
"You can really listen to the ancient parts of you that are responsible for creation and inspiration and the most Buddhist-loving parts of yourself, you can tap those better when your mind is quiet, and to quiet your mind requires more and more discipline these days because it's insane out there.
"And I just feel better alone ... I wanted to get through those storms instead of distracting myself from them, because I feel that that's what happens a lot in life. It disappointed me. I felt that was a lapse in discipline."
Slean, 27, is the consummate artist. She spent a lot of time in that cabin painting as well, and she takes part in a group exhibit this June in Toronto. She finds herself fearing reaction to her work, which isn't a familiar emotion for the shy but brave Slean, who spent her youth cultivating a fanbase in the coffeehouse circuit.
As is the case with all her albums, her years of classical music study leave their mark, in the form of sweetly atmospheric pop, torch songs, flourishes of campy cabaret, in a strong, girlish voice that brings to mind Tori Amos or Kate Bush.
One of the standout songs on the album is a ballad called Mary, on which Slean sings about her grandmother during the war years, when her husband had gone off to war and she was left alone and pregnant. It's a stunning, soothingly beautiful song, and like a lot of her cabaret noir, pop songs, Lucky Me, Day One, California, Sweet Ones, it contains a signature elegance.
"Music to me is closer to painting than any other discipline in that you use flavours, and you use them sparingly," she says.
"You use a limited, complimentary palette, and you try to evoke something with little."
And those little details can add up to something big.
� The Vancouver Sun 2005
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