Preview
ANDREA REVEL
Wednesday, July 6
The Castle Pub
Some of you may remember Andrea Revel from her local coffeehouse days. Born and bred in Calgary, Revel was a regular on the local singer-songwriter scene until a couple of years ago, when she unexpectedly – and accidentally – moved to Montreal. Having one acoustic album under her belt, she had already started on an album that was, perhaps almost presciently, different.
"I decided with my second album to do something that really pushed me right out of my comfort zone," says Revel.
This wish to be pushed coincided with some recording work she was doing with her good friend Mike McCann (the sound designer and music editor for FUBAR and It’s All Gone Pete Tong). McCann had an abiding fascination for what Revel calls "urban" music, and Revel found herself challenged as never before by McCann’s tastes.
"I’m such a folk girl, but you can really create a lot of atmosphere and character with urban music," says Revel. "We decided to try it out and see what would happen. We recorded three songs and we both loved it so much we decided to finish the album in Montreal."
McCann and his cronies, buoyed by the success of FUBAR, had made a decision to move to Montreal to pursue their artistic careers and Revel decided to tag along, in aid of finishing the album. The move ended up being a shift – physically, mentally and emotionally – that she had never expected.
It’s a common thing for those who live outside Quebec, and have never visited it, to belittle its repeated claims of being a "distinct society." Anyone who has spent any time in the province knows differently. The change was a challenging one for Revel.
"Most of the second album was written while I was going through a pretty dark time emotionally. It was such a huge change," she says. "I was such a small-town girl and I just wasn’t ready for what moving to the ‘big city’ would mean. All the homeless people, the prostitutes, the junkies – I was a naive girl having her eyes opened. And I was very lonely, and very poor.
"I would get up at five in the morning to go to work at a shitty little coffee shop, and I spoke hardly any French at this point, which was brutal. Five a.m. is the scariest time of night (in Montreal). I mean, in Calgary, things are pretty quiet at 5 a.m. – everybody’s mostly gone to bed. But here, that’s the scariest time to be out. There are absolutely no women around, lots of scary drunk guys who would make a beeline for me the moment they saw me, lots of mentally ill people weaving in and out of traffic."
Revel pauses, then says soberly, "I wrote a lot of Citysong surrounded by that vibe.… Desperation and survival were my main emotions while writing – not only feeling them, but surrounded by them as well."
The desperation wasn’t eased by an increasingly stretched deadline on the writing and recording of Citysong. "It was supposed to take six months, but it took a year and a half," Revel admits sheepishly. McCann was still producing the album, but his creative career was on the move as well. Towards the end of the album, he had become involved in the production of Pete Tong, which added pressure to the need to finish Revel’s album.
In the end the job got done and the result was an altogether more striking and atmospheric sound than Revel had previously imagined for herself. And with the close of the recording process came a sea change in her relationship with the big city.
"If you’d asked me a year ago if I was staying in Montreal, I’d have said, ‘No.’ I felt like a Calgary girl through and through for a long time," she says, laughing. "To make the shift was really hard, but one day I realized that my ties to Calgary had drifted and Montreal had gotten into my blood.
"It’s challenging, though. The folk music writers’ scene is not big here. Those people are hard to find. And it’s especially challenging because the Anglo music scene is so small here. And you’re always competing with others on an international scale. Music from all over the world is always happening here. So on any given night, I could be competing with, say, Bjork, for an audience. How am I supposed to convince people to come see me instead of Bjork?"
Nevertheless, Revel is making a living at being a musician, a thing she adores. "My experience in Calgary was that most of us musicians had side jobs. Nobody here really does. Everybody is making their way as musicians. It’s another reason it would be hard to move back. All my friends in Calgary are settled, with kids and houses and stuff. It’s hard to always be the weirdo musician. But here, everybody has the exact same lifestyle as me, so it never seems weird to want to jam at two in the afternoon, or four in the morning."
And Revel’s close ties are, ironically, largely Calgarian. Her roommate is Rembetika Hipsters violinist Brigitte Dacszer and she’s still best buddies with the FUBAR gang. And her folk roots are still adamantly showing, although they are increasingly mixed with an urban contemporary sensibility.
"My next album will have more of an urban sound again," Revel says. "I’ve started experimenting with simple loops onstage these days. I’m becoming quite a gearhead. Although I’d really like at some point to do a very simple guitar-and-voice album. And I’m beginning to feel the urge to buy a big old Gretsch, and really learn how to wail on the electric guitar." |
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