Not often in the music industry does an artist come
along whose performances and sense of musical
style defy classification. Sara Craig's ability to
electrify and entrance audiences is most often
described in surreal terms. In the words of one
writer: "Her voice is as supple as melting wax. It
expands and contracts, wrapping itself around
words, transforming them into brilliant gobs of aural
colour."
"My influences aren't necessarily musical," says the self-taught singer-songwriter. "An amazing movie or a dance performance would more likely arouse a germ of a song idea. For me, everything about music is visual. There's instrumentation and I sing words, but it's an abstract approach at best."
Abstract is key for the tall, reed-thin Craig whose wholly original persona has blossomed and evolved since her 1991 Sara Craig EP debut and hit single "Bike", and 1994's full-length album Sweet Exaust. A sensual, multi-faceted chanteuse, Craig draws on a diverse artistic background of theatre, dance and fine art to mold and shape a presence ignited by her energy and spontaneity both on stage and off. One moment she's trilling the scales like an opera diva; the next, she's writhing in Martha Graham-contortions.
The February '97 release of Miss Rocket , Craig's third album, provides a whole new wardrobe of personas to explore, leading the singer to a new level where her keen life observations are cocooned in custom-tailored grooves. The self-assuredness and fluidity of this album is a reflection of Craig's artistic growth.
"This represents a return to a simple state of mind and approach. I listen now to Sweet Exaust and know it represents a moment in time for me. It's more brooding, insular, introspective. The lyrical content of Miss Rocket is just as colourful, but it's more open, innocent and friendly. Listeners will recognize their own experiences in my translation of life's quirky turns and relationships."
The title song, "Miss Rocket", is a melodic, Jetson-like, Marlene Dietrich pop song. "Miss Rocket" started out as an observation of a friend's relationship that worked its way into a song about unfair love and the search for contentment. Now it's a character I'm quite fond of."
"Keep On Driving" and "My Sky Too" pick up on the rhythmic simplicity of "Miss Rocket" with their essays on how we are all born into a situation and everything is manipulated by fate. "Breakwall" is a funkier departure with eccentric visual imagery -- "Dare me to run up your nylons, I wonder if pylons float like buoys?". "You Make Me Happy" is a lullaby; soothing in an atypical way.
Unabashed daring and non-convention have been the guiding lights of Craig's career path. In 1987, with no experience except years of fantasizing a career as a singer, Craig placed an ad in a Toronto magazine for musicians to collaborate with. "It was completely impulsive and unintentionally presumptuous of me. I was holding court without any right to -- I was completely green, but I knew I had to begin as "Sara Craig" instead of an anonymous member of a cover band," recalls Craig. A naive beginning to be sure, but it gave Craig the opportunity to stretch and hone her elastic vocals with "whoever would get on stage with me. I was privileged to work with a lot of accomplished, selfless musicians."
By the early '90s, a musical marriage with drummer Gary Orme produced the independent Sara Craig E.P. which whisked her into the public spotlight and the top of several record charts. Most Promising Artist and Best Female Vocalist nominations proved Craig's instincts and peculiar approach had touched an industry chord.
Sweet Exhaust , the much demanded follow-up, was recorded in a church outside of Toronto and produced by John Punter (Roxy Music, Japan). Catapulting Craig's eclectic style further into the mainstream's consciousness, the album was showered with critical praise at home and on the international scene. Sweet Exhaust reaches heights that many performers never achieve in a lifetime of recordings," summed up one reviewer.
Miss Rocket , recorded at London England's Metropolis Studios with Chris Tsangarides (The Tragically Hip, Concrete Blonde) at the producing helm, takes Craig's musical adventure further afield. "There was this innocent feeling going into the recording studio; a trust I was surrounded by the right energies and singing the right songs," says Craig.
The songs, penned during a year of creative exploration by the singer, were recorded in six weeks, with 90% of the vocal tracks captured on the first take. Mixing and polishing were completed in Toronto.
Expectations for Miss Rocket ? "Well, it's our third time around, and just like
your third time on a bike or skis, you become more fluid, more at one with the
experience. There's still a lot of unknown, but it's a comfortable unknown."
---Universe Music (Canada)
Miss Rocket
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Understandably, there will be those quick to include Mae Moore alongside such artists as Sarah McLachlan, Joni Mitchell, and Diana Krall. Yet in many ways, the acclaimed Canadian singer/songwriter stands apart, with a musica vision that remains steadfastly her own. Mae's soulful blend of rock, folk, and jazz carries a unique imprintur, unencumbered by imitative links to others. That was true in the beginning of her career, and is true today with IT'S A FUNNY WORLD, her Paras Recordings debut album and sixth overall.
Produced by Joby Baker, and written entirely by Mae, IT'S A FUNNY WORLD is a blend of old and new. In addition to performing seven new songs, Mae revisits four from the past, including two ("Red Clay Hills" and "Superstitious") from her 1990 debut album Oceanview Motel, and two others ("Bohemia" and "All I Can't Explain") from more recent recordings. "I wanted to give them a different, more acoustic treatment," says Mae of the remakes. "In the past, one of the things people have commented on was that my vocals have been buried in the mix, and one of my goals on this album was to make the vocals more present."
That she does, with a voice tempered by time and mellowed with experience. IT'S A FUNNY WORLD kicks off with the intimate title track (mixed by Greg Penny of k.d. lang fame), a seamless weave of jazz and pop recounting reconciliation between long-ago lovers. "I grew up listening to jazz," says Mae. "I love jazz because it's so unpredicatble." The gentle waltz "Last Time" is a wry meditation on the drive to couple up, while "All I Can't Explain" proves a spirited catalogue of the heart's little mysteries. With her churning guitar and scatting vocal, Mae skillfully combines folk and jazz idioms in "Who Knows," a lush uptempo ballad about love's misdirected ways, while the bass and ambient strings of "Love Will Bring You Back" and the melancholy "The Reckoning" lend added sweetness and light to her beautiful melodies.
The droning sitar, tabla, and ambling half-spoken verses of "Red Clay Hills" and "Bohemia" make them two of the album's strongest tracks, the first being about the vanishing wildness of Canada's Prince Edward Island. "It's about questioning all this so-called progress," says Mae. "Bohemia" is a swirling cityscape about self-discovery, seemingly more dreamed than sung. The clever key changes and sassy piano/sax intro of "All I Have" make this one of Mae's more jazz-flavoured songs. "It was influenced by Wayne Shorter's song 'Ana Maria,'" notes Mae. "Only Man On Coney Island" is a straight-up jazz piece based on a true story about a man from Prince Edward Island who left to caretake Coney Island, while "Superstitious," with it's organ flourishes and elegant choral harmonies, offers a bemused voice from a star-crossed lover down on her luck.
Mapping the human heart has long been Mae Moore's calling, and her many fans on both sides of the border prove she's always been good at it. She got her start in the smoky folk clubs and coffeehouses of southern Ontario, later moving on to the thriving club scene of Vancouver, B.C. Her first big break as a songwriter came when she penned the lyrics to "Heaven In Your Eyes," the 1985 hit for Loverboy from the "Top Gun" soundtrack.
A subsequent demo led to her first recording contract with CBS Records (later Epic/Sony) and her 1990 debut solo album Oceanview Motel. Released in Canada, the album spawned the hit single "I'll Watch Over You." From there, Mae left for Australia to record her follow-up album Bohemia (1992), the title track from which went on to Triple A and Modern Rock chart success in both Canada and the U.S.
For her 1995 third album Dragonfly, Mae set up shop in her own home, recording the album in those comfortable confines. The single "Genuine" from that album led to a SOCAN Award for Most Played Radio Track. It was around then that Mae undertook the search for the daughter she'd given up for adoption many years earlier. In time, that search proved successful, and now she and her grown daughter are very close.
Mae turned in a 1999 self-titled Big Hip Records release, followed by a lovingly assembled retrospective album Mae Moore: Collected Works 1989-1999, released in 2000. It offered fans and critics a good look at her remarkable musical growth over the years. At the same time, Mae relocated again to British Columbia, to live in the quiet woods of Vancouver Island, not far from the capitol city of Victoria.
To record IT'S A FUNNY WORLD, Mae once again felt there was no place like home. "It's a wonderful atmosphere," she says, "and far more personal." Producer Joby Baker, a brilliant musician himself, took advantage of every conceivable instrument... including the kitchen floor! Says Mae, "He played beach stones, banged on the kitchen floor, a fire poker, all kinds of found objects to create unique sounds."
The songs for the new album are, as Mae points out, "reflective of where I've been at these last couple of years living by myself. They're about personal growth." That growth was spurred by her artistic evolution. "I enjoy being a writer these days," she says, "because I do have a lot of life experience and perspective. I always thought of myself as a songwriter first, setting a landscape for each song, seeing things the way a painter does."
These days Mae sees greater need for the healing power of music. "More than ever we need to connect in community," she says, "and not feel so isolated. Songwriters bring the world together. That's also my mandate: helping people feel less alone." And that's exactly what Mae Moore intends to do with IT'S A FUNNY WORLD. As she notes, "For the first time, I feel I have an album that truly represents me. I invested my heart and soul into this one, and it's the album I always wanted to make."
It's A Funny World
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It is this question that charts the focus of Dalbello's new album entitled whore.
Dalbello steps out front once again on a poetic path that began with the critically acclaimed albums whomanfoursays (Capitol, 1984)
and She (Capitol, 1987), and points an intense light onto her new collection of work to reveal an intimate, unsparing and unapologetic
portrait of a sculpture named "whore".
Dalbello recalls, "Before I even began recording this album, I had written a poem called whore, which evolved into the pivotal song
that became the foundation for the album .....the song whore is about the loss of self; and about the loss of self-esteem. It's about trading
in your values.....selling out....in exchange for some kind of gain....whatever that may be--whether it's to be loved, to be accepted, to fit in,
to climb a ladder of success...but ultimately, it's about power and powerlessness: The moment you place your self-worth into the hands of
others, you devalue yourself...you prostitute yourself."
The first single eLeVeN, is a brilliant example of the poetic and melodic devices she employs to anoint your senses: the song begins by leading the listener down a calm river of sound guiding us through the first half of the song on an almost hypnotic journey; the atmosphere is eerily pin-cushioned by a high-pitched guitar tone that sounds like distorted radio noise emitting a signal of things to come.
She reflects, eLeVeN is about Time: about knowing how precious it is, how easy it is to throw away, and about how Time has the power to heal." The word 'eleven' is repeated like a Mantra and acts as a sort of measuring stick of Patience that's called upon to manage a level of calm whenever old memories or old angers begin to surface. Her trance-like vocals gauge her way through the song like mercury in a thermometer. She comments, "You know---when you sometimes feel like you're just about to reach the boiling point---you've heard that saying of when someone says they're gonna 'count to ten' in an attempt to cool themselves off?---well, I like to think of the number eleven as that extra degree of distance that the stretch of your Patience can extend to."
Dalbello produced the album whore with her engineer, Richard Benoit; she began recording three of the songs in L.A. where she moved to in 1990 to write and produce for other artists . She completed the rest of the album in Toronto, where she was born. An ardent disciple of pre-production, Dalbello wrote, arranged and pre-recorded all the songs, demoing them first in the studio in her home and writing on almost every track with her brother Stefano Dalbello, whom she sites as "an inspirational and unique collaborator and envisioneer". She spent her time alone, hacking on guitars, basses and vocals, and on "just about any orthodox and unorthodox noise generating device that the tracks summoned for."
When the actual recording of the album commenced, Dalbello chose to generate the core sound and rhythmic elements from her computer, while tracking the songs live from the studio floor. She recorded the basic tracks together with a group of colleagues ranging from Alain Johannes, guitarist of the L.A. based "riot grrrl" power trio Eleven, to Justin Clayton, guitarist for Julian Lennon & Roland Orzebal of Tears For Fears, and to the arresting Tommy Lee, monster drummer of Mötley Crüe.
The bleeding bass groove and gnarling guitars riffs enact a slaughter on all the funk arteries and sensibilities that would even leave Trent Reznor ravenous. From the opening track Heavy Boots, her voice exudes an irreverent undertone against a mocking wah-wah guitar that impeaches her thinly veiled good-intentions. Distorted clavinets and lacerating guitar and bass lines hammer away in Deep Dark Hole, while Dalbello sarcastically snaps her words out in machine-gun cadence.
If the song whore is the crucible of Dalbello's new album, then The Revenge Of Sleeping Beauty is its redemption. Brutally elegant,
the dark Middle Eastern epic begins with a caged-cautious and deliberate groove and errupts into a crunch of guitars and sitars;
Dalbello hisses and gnarls her way through the story of a woman who is in a deep sleep of Denial, as narrated by her darker
self...."They are two parts of the same person----conflicting emotions---yet conspiring together, to avoid taking responsibility for her own
actions or lack of action, pre-occupied with the blaming of others and too consumed with anger to be able to forgive herself and
Some of the album's bittersweet compositions will deceivingly wrap you up in a warm blanket, only to then envelop you in a ferocious fire of emotion, as if the lyrics' and music's anthemic rage were driven by demons. Dalbello's voice can be intoxicating and pure, and then instantly bruise and become switchblade sharp.....she lets you step into her skin and joy-ride the charted and uncharted emotional territories she has herself once navigated.
The artwork on the cover of Dalbello's album is haunting and provoking: a blood-red wall surrounds a pale alabaster-skinned half-person sculpted in her own image, her head and neck fastened with buttons onto her shoulders, her torso forever fixed onto a pedestal......a corroded bronze plaque with the name "whore" engraved into it---an exhibit in the museum of the past. The human eyes stare right back at us----almost into us---in all it's strange and unpolished beauty, imploring us to come closer----if you dare. "The sculpture on the album cover is there as a reminder of what you can become when you whore yourself: an immobilized half-person."
Dalbello posits wry autopsies of self-love/hate affairs and of the psyche's blurry line between shadow and light, where sometimes in the
end, the euphoric power of confession, impeachment and forgiveness can all collide, and like a blessed cocktail from the heavens, produce
the regenerative properties of healing.
Drastic Measures
Originally released under St-12140 on May 19, 1981
Features the singles "Never Get To Heaven" and "She Wants To Know"
Guest appearances by Ben Mink, Bob Segarini and Bob Esty
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This week's erratic selection concludes with an album released back in 1994 that I only came across recently, and have been meaning
to slip in a brief plug for some issue. Nan Vernon is apparently a protege of ex-Eurythmic Dave Stewart, though his only appearance
here is in the thank-yous. She plays guitar and assorted other things, she wrote or co-wrote all but two of these dozen songs, and she
co-produced several of them as well. Other assistance is here rendered by bassist/synthesist Matthew Seligman, Pretenders drummer
Martin Chambers and a whole bunch of people whose names I don't recognize.
The album is another unapologetic entrant in the ethereal dance-pop genre established a decade ago when Kate Bush put out Hounds of Love. On my shelf it sits beside Paula Cole's Harbinger, a bunch of Tasmin Archer discs and Sarah Brightman's Dive, forming a little transitional cluster bridging the gap between Sarah McLachlan (and beyond her Tori, Jane Siberry, Happy Rhodes and Kate herself) on one side, and traditionalists like Milla, Loreena McKennitt and Enya/Clannad on the other. If you don't care for this style, this won't be the conversion factor, but if you do I recommend it enthusiastically. "Motorcycle" is a pop classic (worthy of inclusion on a theme tape with the Icicle Works' "Motorcycle Rider" and the Manic Street Preachers' "Motorcycle Emptiness"), "Elvis Waits" sounds like Sarah Brightman doing a forgotten Bowie song, "No More Lullabyes" contains one of my two favorite pop implementations of lines about moving to France (the other, in the incredibly off chance that you wondered, is in the old Fischer-Z song "So Long"), "Big Picture" and "Lay Down Joe" are spooky, "Fisherman" is a stab at emulating the second half of Hounds of Love, which most people shy away from, and the banshee/calliope title track makes for a distinctive finale. The two covers, George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and the martial German torch song "Johnny's Birthday", seem like rather ill-advised experiments to me, as does the short digression into dance-funk, "Treasure", but these aberrations can be easily programmed around even if you agree with me, and the rest of it is well worth the extra button-pushing.
And besides, anybody who owns Brightman's album is hardly in a position to criticize.
----from war against silence
Manta Ray
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Album Notes:
Personnel includes: Nan Vernon (vocals, guitar, strings, piano, keyboards, harmonium), B.B.
Watkins, Jimmy Taylor, Andy Ross, Chris Sheehan (guitar), Nick Pyall (guitar, bass, programming),
James Hallawell (slide guitar, strings, keyboards, sound effects), Jonathan Perkins (strings, piano,
organ, keyboards, background vocals), Alex Gifford (saxophone), Olle Romo (keyboards, drum
programming, background vocals), Ian Stanley (keyboards, programming), Mark Pickard (bass),
Matthew Seligman (bass, Moog bass), Stefan Raoul (drums), Chris Bell (drums, percussion),
Martin Chambers (drums, percussion, background vocals), John Reynolds (drum programming).
Producers: B.B. Watkins (track 1); Nan Vernon, Olle Romo (tracks 2, 9); Ian Stanley (track 3); Nan Vernon, Jonathan Perkins (tracks 4, 8, 11); Phill Brown (track 5); Nan Vernon, Chris Sheehan (track 6); Clive Martin (track 7); Nan Vernon, Matthew Seligman (track 10); Jonathan Perkins (track 12).
Engineers: Olle Romo, Dick Meaney, Nick Addison, Darren Allison, Steve Williams, Steve
Jackson, Clive Martin, Phill Brown, Pascale, Barney.
All songs written or co-written by Nan Vernon except "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (George
Harrison) and "Johnny's Birthday" (Hollander).
Catalog # ele61763 CD $15.99
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