Singer, songwriter, poet and playwright Amelia Curran takes a well-deserved break.

DETAILS

Amelia Curran
Local 522
Saturday, September 26 - Saturday, September 26

More in: Folk / Country

After a decade spent honing her craft in Halifax, folk-rock singer-songwriter Amelia Curran felt that familiar pluck on the heartstrings, a desire to revisit her hometown of St. John’s, Newfoundland. While she was home for the recording of her latest album, Hunter Hunter, she wasn’t always on familiar ground: Curran and her bandmates were dragged by veteran East Coast producer Don Ellis to such alien environs as a dilapidated farmhouse on the edge of town and the abandoned CBC building on downtown Duckworth Street.

“The CBC building was just so scary and gloomy, but I really like that kind of gloom,” Curran says with a mischievous upturn in her voice. “Plus, it was wintertime and we only had space heaters, which we couldn’t keep turned on while we were recording. I felt bad for the musicians with their instruments being that cold, and perhaps they even felt frightened, but it definitely inspired some exciting performances.”

The rooms weren’t the only thing about the recordings that tortured the musicians. Hunter Hunter features a wide range of arrangements, from minimal acoustic guitar laments to more immediate full-band arrangements, and perfecting those arrangements often put a lot of pressure on the musicians. The subtle accordion that appears halfway through “Bye Bye Montreal” is a perfect fit for the song’s wistful lyrical ode to the city, but as Curran explains, it almost didn’t turn out that way.

“You don’t want to upset an accordion player, but I did,” she says. “I think we had half an hour left in the studio so I turned to him and said, ‘Why don’t you just add a part here? No problem right?’ He asked what [key] the song was in and I said F-sharp, which is probably the worst key for an accordion. Then he gave me the hairy eyeball, but he pulled it off.”

More than the performances or even her soulful croon, Curran’s songs are typified by evocative lyrics and emotionally driven character studies, likely spiralling out of her secondary pursuits as a poet and playwright. With clever double entendres such as “you had me by the Bible, you had me by the belt,” Hunter Hunter’s “The Mistress” is an attention-grabbing first-person narrative. However, as Curran explains, despite what other write-ups have attested, it may or may not actually be about “the other woman.”

“I wrote that song in a day a long time ago and I attribute it to drama, youth and defensiveness,” Curran explains. “The mistress is not typically a very well-liked character, so I’ve played that song and introduced it by saying everything is true except for the title. I don’t know why I called it that, but it is written from the same enraged role. A lot of times a song can be about anything, though, and ‘The Mistress’ provides such a great defensive narrative, so I don’t want to correct anyone’s assumptions.”

A similarly interpretive stream of religious imagery floats through much of Curran’s songbook, manifesting most clearly in Hunter Hunter’s “Ah Me,” a tune which translates biblical myths into real-life epiphanies. As she tells it, Curran is often sucked into this well of lyrical fodder without even realizing it, having studied The Good Book under a group of hip, guitar-playing nuns back in high school. For her, it’s as familiar as the town she returned to for the recording.

“Catholic school does have a bit of a reputation, doesn’t it?” she asks with a chuckle. “It’s there in the ether of the building and I think it soaks into you for the rest of your life. I’m certainly not a fan of religion, but those references are so huge and encompassing that they’re great for writing. The imagery is so relatable yet at the same time it can mean nothing.”

“I want to invent a drinking game where every time I make a biblical reference you take a drink,” she continues. “By the end of an album, you’d probably be pretty drunk.”