When Sarah Slean studied classical piano at U of T, she got so nervous she vomited before each recital. “When Brahms was playing what he wrote, I’m sure it was gut-wrenchingly beautiful,” she says. “But for me to take what he owns and try to reproduce it—I just got this image of him rolling over in his grave and going, ‘It’s all wrong!’ I only play classical music at home, alone, with all the windows closed.”
This may explain her switch to pop music, a move that paid off earlier this year with the release of her stunning major-label debut, Night Bugs. The album is a roller coaster of drama and melody, drawing as much from vaudeville, Parisian cabaret and Salvation Army brass as from the singer-songwriters she’s most often compared with. It’s a gorgeously nocturnal record, full of lush strings and drunken confessions. “I don’t imagine any of these songs taking place in the daytime,” Slean said.
Night Bugs had a peculiar birthing process. Most indie artists would kill for a shot at a major label deal: it means better exposure, a chance at a hit record, and, perhaps most importantly, the cash flow to quit the three schlep jobs it takes to stay afloat in the city. But when Warner and Atlantic came calling, Slean—a precocious 21-year-old at the time—told them to call back in a couple of years.
“A major-label debut would be the album that most people would first hear me on, the album that would be identified with me,” Slean explains. “I wasn’t ready to make that album yet. I wanted to be a producer, to write string arrangements, to grow. I told Atlantic that I needed to make my own record first. I decided that I could eat Kraft Dinner for another year.”
It sounds like madness, but Slean was right. Where Blue Parade, her 1999 indie disc, felt precious and polite, Night Bugs is a swinging, supremely confident coming-out party. The record’s magic is due in large part to Slean’s hyperactive imagination: she often slips into the fantasy life of her alter ego Emily, a sad-luck fin-de-siecle Parisian who lives on poetry and vermouth. “Emily has such a big personality,” Sarah explains. “She paints, and she drinks too much, and she wears tattered ballgowns. All her emotions are huge, and everything in her life is a grand tragedy.”
It’s Emily who sings most of the songs on Night Bugs. The album is centred around “Book Smart, Street Stupid,” a moving mini-epic that serves as Emily’s own “Je Ne Regrette Rien.” Amidst sleepy trombones and an elegiac melody, she sketches her life story: “I was a lead in the orphan choir / and I sang with all my might.” Years later, Emily is dissolute and unendingly romantic. “So don’t look for me in confession booth / I’m with my paints and my pens and my dry vermouth / trying to uncover some small truth / with these cards close to my chest … The rain, still never ending / the wonder in my heart / still lights and glows in the dark.” Painting a broad canvas with the tiniest of details, the song is evidence of Slean’s marvellous gift for narrative.
Slean also imagines herself as Cookie, a hard-nosed crime photographer whose writings frequently appear on Slean’s web site. “I feel like Cookie and I actually have the same job,” she says. “We both deal in aftermath. We observe and distil.” No wonder Slean is such a great storyteller; she’s so attuned to the stories in and around her.
Indeed, much of Night Bugs has a fable-like quality to it, a reflection of the place where the album was born. “We recorded the album in Bearsville,” Slean explains, “and we were staying in a little cottage on the grounds. Every night, we walked back to our cottage through the woods, and the crickets and the frogs and the night bugs would be singing,” she says, and she can’t help slipping into fantasy again. “I felt like we were Hansel and Gretel.”
Sarah Slean plays the Phoenix Concert Theatre tonight.
