This stuff just writes itself — while making her latest album, Winnipeg songwriter Christine Fellows found inspiration in the most remarkable places
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By definition, Winnipeg singer-songwriter Christine Fellows is a solo artist. Both sonically and lyrically, few artists have as distinct a voice as hers, and when you pick up her latest album Nevertheless, hers is the only name on the cover. However, she’s quick to point out that despite all that, she is not one to work alone.
“A lot of inspiration comes from the act of collaboration with people and seeing where things take them as well, and responding to that,” she says. “In fact, it’s a little bit tricky for me to work alone. Maybe the discipline comes from having someone relying on you to actually do something, so you feel, if someone is counting on you, you have to rise to the occasion.”
Certainly that was the case for Nevertheless. After a year of writing accompaniment for documentaries, short films and visual arts pieces, Fellows was approached by Winnipeg-born, Toronto-based choreographer Susie Burpee to compose a song-cycle for her latest modern dance piece.
“She asked me to score a piece for her called ‘The Spinster’s Almanac,’ and I decided that if I was going to have to write a song-cycle, because the writing process takes so much longer for me than my regular commission work… that I was going to make a whole record out of it. And I’m glad I did, because the subject matter was quite rich when I started going. Even though it began as an assignment of self, if it was something I wasn’t into, I knew I wouldn’t be able to complete it.”
Using “The Spinster’s Almanac” as a springboard, Fellows set out to populate Nevertheless with a variety of solitary characters. Reworking Greek mythology, pulling life stories from long-forgotten obituaries and even recasting a man in the traditionally female role of a spinster, the result is a beautifully unified collage. And while Nevertheless takes inspiration from myriad sources, it was Fellows’s accidental discovery of poet Marianne Moore that may have had the single greatest impact on this song-cycle.
“She was a baseball enthusiast, as am I. She was a Muhammad Ali aficionado. She kept a pet alligator in her bathtub. She also won the Pulitzer Prize and the national book award and was writing in the 1940s and lived in the New York area. She was taken seriously as a woman — a solitary woman no less,” says Fellows. “I just found that totally fascinating, and I got drawn into her work and her world. So it was almost like a collaboration with a no-longer living person in a sense — taking bits of her life and her work and responding to it.”
There’s a certain irony in the fact that a notorious collaborator like Fellows has penned an almost-concept record about people who live and work alone. While Burpee’s modern dance piece and Moore’s poetry informed the writing of the album, a host of guest musicians made their mark on the recording. In addition to cello-playing by longtime collaborator Leanne Zacharais and backup vocals by Fellows’s husband, The Weakerthans’ John K. Samson, Fellows enlisted the help of seven other close friends and musicians to perform on Nevertheless. Their varied styles take the album from Phillip Glass-styled instrumentals to loping piano-pop numbers without missing a step. This is no accident.
“I wanted to record the record very socially,” says Fellows. “My previous record, I recorded pretty much in my house by myself, and people mailed in their contributions, or I would have them come visit me briefly and they would play in my living room, just the two of us. This time, because the material was about a solitary person, I wanted this series of characters to have a vivid interior life. I wanted to feel like there were many people there. I don’t know if I succeeded, but there were a lot of people there.”
Ultimately the album is a success. Lush and fragile, dire and buoyant, epic and intimate, Nevertheless deals in extremes, all the while living up to Fellows’s back catalogue. Never one to be bound by expectations, Fellows used whatever tool she had at hand to make the record, and the resulting process offered up a little big of magic in return.
“It was like the record was already done and I just had to fill in the blanks,” says Fellows. “Even when I was writing it, it felt like it already existed. I just had to go and find it and put it in the right spot, like a treasure hunt or something.”
