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 Heather Adler
It's been a tumultuous two years since Sarah Slean burst onto the international stage with her flamboyantly quirky, cabaret-style debut release Night Bugs, and for a while it seemed questionable whether her idiosyncratic sound would ever make it onto another record. But after battling back from what she calls "the brink of disaster," Slean has defeated her demons and found a new solace in her music, art, and self. She's also found there can be beauty in the breakdown.
"It was just like I fell through some kind of mental trapdoor or like I fell into some quicksand," explains a more-sombre-than-expected Slean. "I guess there was something going on in my mind that wasn't computing anymore -- beauty was getting by me and I wasn't catching it."
Although she says she can't pinpoint exactly what it was that cause her once-idealistic principles to become shattered by depression. Slean knew by teh summer of 2003 she had to make a drastic change. Like many artists, she was struggling with her hectic life and drained by the pressures of Toronto life. "I didn't like anything," she describes. "I was just feeling like there was a hole in my inside and there were too many distractions around me for me to take the time to figure things out. I lost it, rented a truck, put the piano in the back and made a last-ditch attempt to save myself."
Equipped with only her most beloved instrument and a heart full of ache, Slean disappeared into the solitude of the wilderness, holing up in a cabin so remote she had to carry her water in from an outdoor pump. There she spent countless days thinking, writing, painting and creating the songs that would make up her new album, Day One. "There were several days when I thought, 'What am I doing here?' and several days of mind-opening experiences. There were days when I didn't speak at all and days when I felt at last there was no tension in my body; my hair stopped falling out and I stopped drinking so much."
"The experience of going there was the gel that glued everything together," Slean continues. "I chose the title Day One because I wanted it to be a reversal of the idea 'One day I'll figure things out' and changed that to 'Right now I'll figure this out.'"
Listening to the album, it's easy to find clues as to what it was Slean discovered in the woods; Day One is riddled with lyrics focused on ruin and rebirth, while the arrangements are decidedly more atmospheric, with a whimsical, Renaissance sensibility to them. It's quite a departure from her more upbeat debut, but darkly beautiful nonetheless. Still, SLean says the themes that emerged from her latest effort weren't at all preconceived. "I'd love to be about intent," she says, "but I think sometimes art just happens to you and then later on you figure out what it was about. I didn't go into the cabin and think about the title of my record or what was going to be what. I knew going there that I was nearing some sort of rock bottom. I was going to go there, lie at the bottom, feel terrified and have nightmares. I was ready to do that, which was scary, but I did it, then I climbed back out of the hole with songwriting and making artistic things."
Along with writing music, Slean also found herself inspired to paint like never before. Although she'd dabbled in visual art all her life, she says this particular period was by far her most prolific, and some of the fruits of her labour can be seen on the Day One CD sleeve, which she designed. The images have the same vaguely apocalyptic feel as the music they accompany, and Slean says she hopes the whole package leaves people with the same message she found in her isolation. "I hope people feel like their suffering is a blessing after getting my new album," she says. "It doesn't matter how miniscule it seems compared to others; that suffering is yours and it's a part of your life. Life's a struggle and you're always on the battlefield, but every shitty thing that happens is part of the whole glory of war."
SARAH SLEAN
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