From: owner-navy-soup-digest@smoe.org (navy-soup-digest) To: navy-soup-digest@smoe.org Subject: navy-soup-digest V7 #110 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 Monday, November 29 2004 Volume 07 : Number 110 In This Digest: ----------------- Re: globe and mail article [Paul Schreiber ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 22:19:05 -0800 From: Paul Schreiber Subject: Re: globe and mail article http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/ 20041119/SLEAN19/TPEntertainment/TopStories The art of 'digging in the muck' By Robert Everett-Green Friday, November 19, 2004 - Page R26 Decamping to some isolated spot to stew up the next record has become a ritual for musicians whose natural audience is now or will soon be alumni of a Canadian university. Few, however, have gone rustic with a more ambitious program than Sarah Slean. The waif-like musician abandoned her life in Toronto the way Lot left Sodom, determined to find a less poisonous state of being. "I have a very strong moral sense, and I'm obsessed with living a noble existence," says Slean. "I had to root out a lot of things, personal terrors, hatreds, and sick things that I didn't consider noble. Jealousy, self-pity and fear. It was going to be a lot of painful digging in the muck." There's no better place to dig and get mucky than in the country, so Slean moved to a cabin north of Ottawa. She became like a nun in her cell, sans people, sans TV, sans everything but a need to find the keys to the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. "My body is like a barometer, and before and during my time at the cabin, I was losing weight, and my theory was that I was disappearing," she says. Later, she felt herself growing wings of understanding, and duly painted them on the photographic portrait that appears on the back cover of her latest CD, Day One. As you might deduce from the title, Slean is a big believer in the fresh start and the beginner's mind. Also in making that slight shift in perspective that converts the not-enough into the whole and complete. "I always used to think that things around me weren't quite right, or that they weren't enough. But when you stop throwing up flares and distracting yourself from the large questions, and let yourself loose in the world, you find godliness everywhere. Simple, plain beauty, everywhere." Day One is structured like a single long night of reflection, beginning with the nocturnal cabaret number Pilgrim and ending as a "hole made of gold" lights the world in Wake Up. Slean's Nighttown, like Joyce's, is a place where garish private sins act as a portal to a world truer than the one bolted under the cold steel of convention. Birth, transformation, and the fall that precedes the rising are themes that recur again and again. Sumptuous as they are, the songs often feel naked. The tone of Slean's voice shifts as she tacks between the light and the dark, taking its huskiest sound in Pilgrim, which she described as "the centre of the record." It was also the first to appear during her cabin days, and perhaps the best at expressing her notion of cabaret as a form ideally suited to musicians who have logged time in the muck. "What I love about cabaret is that it was done in the holes of the world, but it's about a lot of triumphant human drama," she says. She cites Judy Garland, a singer whose entourage of demons never prevented her singing, from remaining "joyous in the face of the crappiest circumstances." Day One shows Slean moving away from the piano-centric music of former days, in part because of her understandable reluctance to be corralled with pop keyboard divas such as Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan. Co-producers Dan Kurtz (the New Deal) and Pete Prilesnik (Sarah Harmer) opened the project to a wider pop-rock palette and a more beat-oriented mentality, though all the songs were written on the piano. An even wider stretch awaits. Come Dec. 1, Slean will begin costume fittings and rehearsals for her leading role in Black Widow, a film musical about Evelyn Dick, the Hamilton glamour-puss whose trial for the killing and dismemberment of her husband was the raciest thing to happen to Canada in 1946. At the same time, Slean hopes to finish writing her own stage musical, Boy Wonder, about a boy whose disappearance from a magic city literally leaves the town in the cold. "It's a cautionary Orwellian tale, but it's got a lot more whimsy than that," she says. Also a lot more optimism, if the overt symbolism of the title holds up in the denouement. Slean has seen some dark places, in the mirror and elsewhere, but when the shadows lift she's always full of hope. And ambition, both for herself and for her public. Sarah Slean plays the Danforth Music Hall on Nov. 25, with Ron Sexsmith. $25. 147 Danforth Ave., 416-645-9090. ------------------------------ End of navy-soup-digest V7 #110 *******************************