‘I didn’t think I was making a super-happy record’ — despite the media reaction to her new album, Julie Doiron isn’t making any effort to be chipper.
DETAILS
Broken City
Thursday, June 11 - Thursday, June 11
More in: Rock / Pop
It’s almost too perfect. As Julie Doiron takes my call, she’s elbowing towards the exit of a crowded bar in Toronto’s Kensington district. Outside, she hunkers down near the entrance of Paul’s Boutique, the city’s legendary hub for musical paraphernalia. Noticing some friends hauling a vintage Space Echo effects box towards the door, she interrupts our conversation to ask if they’re looking to sell it. When I tease that it sounds like she’s got a bit of a gear fetish, her run-on response wavers between disjointed and perfectly straightforward — classic Julie.
“I’m not really a gear nerd!” she laughs. “I really like gear, but I haven’t had a lot of money to invest in gear, so the money that I have spent has gone into the same gear I’ve had for like 10 years. So I’m really happy with my gear. I really appreciate gear, but I can’t really afford to buy any new gear… I have the perfect guitar, so I don’t really look at guitars and go like, ‘Ooh I want that,’ so it’s more just amps that I look at, but even then I have a really cool amp already.”
Humble and light-hearted, it’s a reassuring answer for anyone concerned that a recent flurry of activity might have drawn Julie away from her tradition of simplicity. Since the release of 2006’s Polaris Prize-nominated Woke Myself Up, her profile has ballooned progressively to a level comparable to — if not higher than — what she enjoyed during her years in the mid-’90s with Halifax rockers Eric’s Trip. These days, she crops up in the finest of company, including a recent performance in Calgary alongside local darling Chad VanGaalen, and it doesn’t look like she’ll be letting up any time soon.
“Chad and I have a plan to make a record together and it’s either going to be within the next year or maybe within the next five years,” she says. “I don’t really know, but we’ve definitely talked about it and we’re both in. We’re just going to see what our schedules are like and then we’ll make it happen. The Flemish Eye Ball [in Calgary] was a nice opportunity to at least work together, just the two of us. That day, before the show, we just rocked out and I played him my new songs and it was really fun.”
Feeling a sense of déjà vu? It may be because of a similar-in-spirit project released last year called Lost Wisdom. At the tail end of her last Canadian tour, Doiron headed to Washington state with faithful partner (in music and in romance) Fred Squire with the intention of spending a few days hanging out with longtime friend Phil Elverum (Mount Erie, The Microphones), a lo-fi legend in his own right. Fortunately for all of us, they did what musicians are wont to do and found themselves holed up in a studio.
“So the idea was that [Phil] would do two songs, Fred would do two songs, I would do two songs, and that’s how we would go for the whole time,” she recalls. “But because Fred and I are kind of slackers, we looked at Phil and asked if he had any songs that were ready and he said, ‘Yes.’ So he played us the first two and taught them to us right away, and we tried those and they sounded really great, so we said maybe we should just stick with your songs because they sound so good. And he got really excited about it!
“We had two days of office space, basically, and he taught us all the songs one by one right before recording them and it was amazing. It was a wonderful, spontaneous experience where there was no pressure and he would just play the song once and we’d play it all together around one microphone, so it was quite intimate.”
In the wake of the beautiful, brooding material on Lost Wisdom, it was something of a surprise when first impressions of Julie’s 2009 solo release, I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day, began to trickle in. A bizarre majority of press for the album settled on a consensus: Julie used to be gloomy, sullen and depressing, but now she’s happy, happy, happy!
“I didn’t think I was making a super-happy record, and [that reaction] does feel contrived,” she says. “To be fully honest, the last few interviews I’ve done, people have been like ‘You’re so happy on this record! Why?’ Since then, I’ve started to feel like, sure I was really happy for some of the songs, but now it’s just normal.”
Indeed, while the album does include a few tracks that are uncharacteristically chipper — the bookends of “The Life of Dreams” and “Glad to Be Alive” are especially prominent — it also grapples with complex themes, including Doiron’s divorce from the father of her three children. As she tells it, it’s a touching account of a remarkably loving and civil separation, but even the most pleasant divorce is wrought with some sense of sadness and regret. Thus, while the album is never pessimistic or bitter, the accounts of its overflowing happiness have been greatly exaggerated.
“I still love to laugh and have a good time, but I’d hate to think of the record as just being 100 per cent positive because I don’t think that’s what life is like and that’s not how I want that record to be,” she says. “I want it to more represent what life is like: a little bit up, a little bit down, but more up than down.”
Post the first comment: (Login or Register)