Advanced high school notebook poetics
Christine Fellows doesn’t want no guff
PREVIEW
CHRISTINE FELLOWS
Thursday, March 21
Double Mo Café
Christine Fellows springs forth from that uneasy place between striking originality and high school notebook poetry, sticking far closer to the former than the latter. She’s that girl who sat at the back of your science class sketching in her battered and folded cahier, not giving a second thought to anyone else’s opinion.
The Last One Standing, her second solo album and first for upstart label Six Shooter Records, is a combination of fond reflection and grateful escape. Whereas her debut, 2 Little Birds, was a somewhat sullen affair, Last One Standing is an unadulterated pop album (or at least as much of one as Fellows seems capable of making). Sure, there’s "Regrets," in which a 17-year-old Fellows plots her "escape with a dartboard and a blindfold" but soon after realizes things don’t work out quite as planned. Rather than admit defeat, there’s a winking grin spun overtop – this one opportunity may have gone by, but Fellows isn’t 17 anymore and it’s time to get a move on to whatever’s next.
"Veda’s Waltz," written for the nuptials of friend and occasional touring partner Veda Hille, floats atop a wavering spiral of piano and cello, and borrows a quote from The Shipping News to sigh, "love sometimes occurs without pain or misery." The aptly named "Surprise!" does precisely that in its full-on guitar rock attack (courtesy of a helping hand from fellow Winnipeggers the Weakerthans), while "Colourblind" provides a bit of a laugh in proclaiming, "Colourblind babies see grey, grey, grey." In essence, Fellows has taken the dreaded sophomore album challenge and kicked it in the head.
"I suppose you could call it my ‘teenage record,’" says Fellows, on the line from a packed and noisy showcase at the SXSW Music Conference in Austin, Texas. "I think it’s mostly a retrospective type of thing, because in writing with the piano instead of the guitar this time around, it brought me back to that place I was in at 18 and 19."
As a disgruntled and disappointed jazz student ("the structure was too business oriented") Fellows studied the piano, an instrument that she has largely ignored since staggering out of her final round of classes in the art of making contacts. For Last One Standing, the keys once again became her primary instrument, but not without a slight challenge.
"There was stuff I needed to forget in order to do what I’m now doing," she says, explaining that formal training sometimes inhibits expression.
It’s easy at first to mistake Fellows as being another chanteuse behind the piano á la Tori Amos and Sarah Slean, but while Amos and her ilk seem distanced and at times almost unreal, Fellows still possesses those priceless attributes often filed away as either "down home" or alternately "the (cough, cough) girl next door."
"I don’t even think of myself as a piano player, and I don’t even think of myself as a chick," she says. "It’s not the music that I listen to, or the world that I live in. Those comparisons have just made me laugh."
Fellows has only one set of standards and expectations to live up to – her own.
"I’m just going to do what I do, because it’s fun for me to do this. Anyone can say whatever they want to. I don’t even think it’s worth a second thought." |
