From: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org (navy-soup-digest) To: navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Subject: navy-soup-digest V5 #88 Reply-To: navy-soup@smoe.org Sender: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk navy-soup-digest Thursday, May 2 2002 Volume 05 : Number 088 In This Digest: ----------------- NP article [Paul Schreiber ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 21:53:42 -0700 From: Paul Schreiber Subject: NP article [question: how old is sarah anyway? one article say 25, the other 24... when's the sleanster's birthday? --Paul] http://www.nationalpost.com/home/story.html?f=/stories/20020427/41949.html April 27, 2002 She's a little bit Paris, a little bit Pickering Sarah Slean: 24-year-old indie darling has already released third album Lianne George National Post Peter Redman, National Post Sarah Slean at her Toronto home: She insisted on working with a producer her own age. Sarah Slean, a doe-eyed gamine in a faded pink jacket and corduroy hat, seems very much in her element at Il Gatto Nero, a trendy cafi in Little Italy. The room is filled with young, artistic types, any one of whom could be, for all you know, the next God-knows-who. Slean waves to some friends sipping lattes at a nearby table with former MuchMusic VJ Master T and, for a moment, you can almost imagine what being a 24-year-old up-and-coming musician in Toronto feels like. Slean's latest release, Night Bugs, has a sexy, theatrical, slightly boozy sound that you might expect to hear in a 1940s Parisian cafi. The album's first single, Sweet Ones, has an anachronistic quality that betrays hints of Supertramp one minute, Edith Piaf the next. It's the kind of music that, like fellow Canadian Rufus Wainright's, is certain to garner critical acclaim, but, because it's not entirely modern, a mainstream audience might not know what to make of it. "I feel like part of me is from another time," says Slean, who will perform live tonight at the Trinity-St. Paul Centre on Bloor Street West. "I like musical theatre and I adore turn-of-the-century France and old, vintage clothes. Part of me is ancient. But then there's a part of me that listens to Radiohead and thinks that's the ultimate piece of art." Born and raised in Pickering, Slean began listening to the usual suspects (Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Willy Nelson) at age three, began training as a classical pianist shortly after and, by age nine, was writing elaborate musicals. "They were so melodramatic," she says. "They were often family dramas. I was a huge West Side Story fan so there was always a love story, a tragedy, a couple of people dying." Slean studied classical piano briefly in the Masters program at York University, then music theory and history at the University of Toronto. But after deciding that a formal musical education was too restrictive, she began working exclusively on creating her own material. "To me, [the Masters program at York] teaches you to be more of a technician than a musician. People would debate that with me to the ends of the Earth, but that's the way I felt and I was resisting it with every fibre of my being." In 1998, after developing a small, but loyal following on the Toronto club circuit, Slean was approached by Atlantic to record her first full-length album. At the time, however, she felt she wasn't ready. Her manager convinced Atlantic to fund her independently produced CD, Blue Parade, released in 1999, which topped the independent charts. Her major label debut came two years later with her self-titled album, Sarah Slean. When it came time to produce her follow-up, Night Bugs, Slean wanted to find a producer who wouldn't try to run the show. "I'm a control freak. I was looking for a producer who was my age because I wanted to co-produce and I knew that if Atlantic chose someone for me, they'd be like, 'Let the real producer do his job.' " She was sufficiently impressed by the work of Hawskley Workman -- the 27-year-old Toronto wunderkind equally well-known for his self-produced baroque music and his elaborately fabricated personal history -- to seek his help. At their first meeting, Slean and Workman recorded a raw two-song demo in his primitive basement studio in four hours. "We used a piece-of-shit mike stuck inside a piece-of-shit piano and I did the songs in one pass." Even though Slean and Workman were later provided with state-of-the-art equipment to record the rest of the album, those two tracks, including Sweet Ones, made the final cut. "That was the way it came out, mistakes and all," she says, sipping from her latte, "and after listening to it for a while, I learned to fall in love with the mistakes." lgeorge@nationalpost.com; Sarah Slean with Bodega, tonight, 8 p.m., $14. Trinity-St. Paul Centre, 427 Bloor St. W. (416) 870-8000 ------------------------------ End of navy-soup-digest V5 #88 ******************************