>>PREVIEW
THE GREAT LAKE SWIMMERS
Friday, March 30
Liberty Lounge
Clichés are common when you’re talking about music. So many industry PR flacks are so busy putting artists in little boxes that it’s become hard to relate to the art of song craft on anything other than a surface level.
Take The Great Lake Swimmers, for example. Front man Tony Dekker is easily and often slotted in among acoustic singer-songwriters. It’s hard to find any press on him that doesn’t use the word "haunting." One listen to the band’s third full-length, Ongiara, will quickly show that there is more to Dekker than finger-plucked melodies and sad-sack songwriting, yet the music clichés still spring up around them.
THE PROCESS
Songwriting is an organic process for Dekker and as such, the creation of his latest album started much like his others, with him and his guitar. "I just see songwriting as a way of filtering your experience, your human experiences, through your senses," he says. "Generally speaking, I want a song to sound good in the format of just an acoustic guitar and a voice and then just build it from there and see what the song is asking for beyond that instrumentation-wise. And sometimes it asks for a full-band treatment and sometimes it sounds good just on its own."
Ongiara features several stripped-down numbers that make good use of Dekker’s strumming and falsetto croon, but that’s balanced by songs that benefit from what he calls the "full-band treatment." It was when Dekker amassed his touring outfit and hit the road to play that Ongiara really began to take shape.
"There wasn’t really anything conceptual that I was shooting for, but I tend to just write what I feel," says Dekker. "For this album, certain themes arose and I think a lot of it had to do with us being on the road a year-and-a-half leading up to the recording. So themes like natural environment and the physical environment and the mental environment… those kinds of things seemed to surface a lot more on this album."
WHAT’S IN A NAME
When The Great Lake Swimmers finally came off the road, they were ready to commit this new material to tape. To do that, they turned to indie Toronto uber-producer Dale Morningstar who rose to fame with his underrated band, The Dinner is Ruined. The plan was to join Morningstar at his studio, The Gas Station, on Toronto Island. On route to the studio, Dekker discovered the cryptic word that he would use to title the album.
"That was the name of one of the boats that we took over to his studio when we first started the recording," he says. "It’s a cargo-type boat, but the root of the word was actually one of the original native words for the Niagara region and the people that inhabited that area.
"I didn’t know anything about the history of the word. I just thought it sounded really mysterious and great."
THE SOUND
When plans to record in several historical buildings on Toronto Island fell through, Dekker decided on Aeolian Hall in London, Ontario. He had spent time in London and the hall was at the top of the list of places he wanted to record.
"It’s a beautiful old space. It’s a couple hundred years old," he says. "It is one of those spaces that has a very special kind of ambience to it. It’s designed for acoustics and it’s a performance space as well."
The move to Aeolian Hall paid off. Ongiara is drenched in gorgeous natural reverb and while many of the songs play on a small scale, they convey a feeling of massive wide-open spaces. The sounds are tangible and earthy and reflective of a band at one with the organic process of recording. To Dekker’s ear the album isn’t pristine, but he says it’s all the better for it.
"That was kind of a challenge, to make… what I thought was a clean sounding recording but still utilizing the features of the building, too. You have to kind of find a balance between those two when you are in a location recording scenario."
GUEST STARS
The distinct sound of Ongiara is augmented not only by the environment but also by the collection of players that Dekker brought on board for the recording. For a guy who does most of his writing alone, these days he’s becoming quite a collaborator. Extracurricularly he lent his talents to the latest album by Montreal post-rockers Do Make Say Think and for this album, Dekker is joined by singer-songwriter Serena Ryder, lap steel genius Bob Egan, vocalist Sarah Harmer, Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallet and several others.
"It was the first time that I had specific ideas for some songs and those folks were at the very top of the list of people I wanted to work with."
Fleshing out songs like "I am Part of a Large Family" and "I Became Awake," these guests make the bigger moments on Ongiara feel almost massive. Their absence on the quieter numbers makes those passages even more intimate. With judicious use of their talents, Dekker has imbued the album with a dynamic that hasn’t been as apparent on past releases.
THE RESULTS
Despite the complexity of the recording process, what makes Ongiara is simplicity. No matter how they are dressed up, the heart of each song beats with Dekker’s trademark emotion. His turns of phrase are elegant and heartfelt, his delivery is earnest and his music is never showy. He writes classic melodies that are so strong that even on first listen they play with such familiarity, you can sing along.
"I’m aware of the fact that I’m not reinventing the wheel with patterns of the songs, but at the same time it’s important to me to place songs in a timeline or a larger narrative," he says. "For that reason there is a familiarity about them, even without having heard them before.
"That’s something that is important to me, too – to filter my experience and tell the story that I have to tell through using familiar themes."
Best of all, there is a certain optimism that runs throughout Ongiara. Dekker admits that most artists are drawn to extremes of emotion, but in the past that has often translated into sad songs for The Great Lake Swimmers. But that has never been a problem. Nobody writes a lament like Dekker and if you want to get your cry on there is usually nothing better than one of his records. Ongiara, on the other hand, finds Dekker in a more positive headspace and still delivers beautifully crafted songs.
"There is more of a hopeful message in a few of the songs. I’m not trying to re-create the other albums that I have done. I’m trying to develop as a songwriter. I’m trying to move forward positively and write better songs all the time." |
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