>>PREVIEW
THE ALBERTA SESSIONS
March 13 to 24
Engineered Air Theatre (Epcor)
Their musical styles are all different, their muses unique and their roots string across borders, oceans and lifestyles. However, Jeff Landeen, Amy Seeley and Lynn Olagundoye have a lot in common. The songwriters, who will each appear as part of the Alberta Sessions, share a common theme as each of them has decided to really get serious about writing, recording and playing their songs during the past two or three years. To this end, each of them has released their first album within that time period.
Landeen’s base is in Calgary, but his family’s farming and ranching heritage did not cause the young songwriter to grow roots. Instead, for the past decade he travelled the world with his guitar by his side, as both a companion and an icebreaker. His musical journey was inspired when he was 15 and taking a ferry ride from Seattle to Victoria. An old blues player, returning from a year of touring, pulled out his guitar and began to play and tell road stories. Now, Landeen could be the person playing on the ferry.
He recalls being in a Rasta bar in Malaysia and being asked to hit the stage. After a set of Beatles’ covers and other standards, the group passed a hat. Outside, Landeen deposited his take onto the lap of a man sleeping in the rickshaw that was both his workplace and home. Another time in Southern Mexico, a woman paid him for a few nights gigging with free lodging and a pair of handmade pants. When he went to do the set, he found torches lighting his path through the jungle to a place where locals sat on straw mats to hear him. "It was pretty removed from playing places like Karma in Calgary," Landeen says.
With experiences like these, it’s no wonder that the songs on Landeen’s album, Glide, have an earthy, well-travelled, old-soul feel to them. One challenge is being mindful enough to grab onto the inspiration and get it down. "I used to write a lot in coffee shops while I was travelling; I would try to find one where the music was low enough I could ignore it. (I write while) walking. There is a rhythm to walking, travelling. Ideas come when I am walking or moving. I’ve written in a car, on napkins, on the backs of brochures.
"I write in journals and I like to call them books of arrows as there are arrows all over them linking things together."
One wouldn’t expect a player with Landeen’s experience to get stage nerves, but he claims that nerves have served him well in terms of boosting the energy of his live performances. The same could be said of Edmonton’s Amy Seeley, who finds that gigs have a way of taking over her thoughts from the moment she wakes up.
"What I do to battle the nerves is on days I am playing, I do whatever I want. I might take a walk or sit with my coffee or have a massage or anything to pamper myself," Seeley says. She had cause to put all her strategies into action recently when she played several gigs in Toronto. Her lilting, piano-driven music stumbles amongst the ruins of relationships and possibilities. Like her live shows, her album The Trees are Glad You’re Back has been well received across the country.
She got serious about her musical career a couple of years ago, moving to Edmonton after spending about eight years in Calgary. Originally from Wild Horse Plains, Montana, Seeley moved to Calgary to attend college. She returns to Wild Horse Plains occasionally to work in her mother’s garden and encourage her muse to strike.
Citing Tori Amos as a huge influence, Seeley admits that it can be challenging to drop everything else and open the door when her muse knocks. "Writing can happen at anytime. I need to (be disciplined) to actually make sure I write down words that capture those images, that tell their story. When I write, I see pictures in my head that actually come out in the music, so I have to make sure I stop and do it."
While Lynn Olagundoye did not have anything so exotic as a garden in a place with a poetic name like Wild Horse Plains, the native Calgarian did grow up near inspiring views of Fish Creek Park in her community of Woodbine, where her Nigerian-born parents lived. But as she was uncomfortable walking there alone, the real inspiration came in the form of some people from her community who she knew by sight but not name. Serendipitously, she saw them again when she was attending Mount Royal College a few years later, and began to collaborate with their band, Guerrilla Funk Monster.
The young woman whose friends had first noticed her vocal talents when she casually sang along to a Brandi video as an 11-year-old began to write songs after finally meeting the people who had been but faces to her. From the captivating sounds of her album Africa Violet, they were faces she was fated to meet. "(Bassist) Chris would play a line, and I would suddenly hear a phrase – the words would just come to me," Olagundoye says. "I would hear them in my head, and then sing them."
In spite of the magical quality of the music, the young singer uses her job as an underwriter for Canada Mortgage and Housing to stay firmly rooted in reality. "I am a Gemini, so I have this creative, inspired side and this very ordinary side with numbers and responsibility."
With traces of Nigeria, Montana, Malaysia and Mexico showing up in these songwriters’ lives, it is not surprising that such wonderfully diverse styles are born right here, under the Alberta prairie sky.
The Alberta Sessions will also be presenting the Alberta Sessions Songwriting 601, which will take place on March 13 to 15 at That Empty Space (MacEwan Hall, U of C) with musicians such as Chris Vail, Matt Masters and Lullaby Baxter. There will also be an ARIA/SOCAN Session on Saturday, March 24 from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at the J.J. Young Room (Epcor). |
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