Marking the Blue Hour

Earth Angel’s Leah Magnan loves to find and finds to love.

Last summer, the Edmonton-raised, independent maker of what she refers to lovingly as “dyke rock” was browsing at a second-hand corporation’s brick-and-mortar outpost when she spotted an EKO bass pedal on the shelf, negotiating with the thrift gods to procure the valuable tool for just $20.

She didn’t feel bad about walking away from Value Village with an honest-to-goodness grail. And as soon as she took the pedal home, she set out to feature it on her debut EP, Blue Hour, released this week and recorded at Winnipeg’s Collector Studio.

“It produces a really cool, deep synth bass sound, and so we used it on House on Fire, which is probably the most produced song on the album: that was the only one we didn’t do live-off-the-floor,” says Magnan, a music therapist who works with Artists in Healthcare.

That EP’s final song got its title from an astrological app called Co-Star — launched in 2017 as the “first-ever AI-powered” astrology app, per Vanity Fair — that delivers daily affirmations and guidances based on the user’s birth chart.

“Every day they give you a little line, and the line it gave me once was, “Your heart is a house on fire,” and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to write a song with that.’”

At the studio, Magnan says, producer Will Grierson built the track from a beat machine, which was then layered with vocal harmonies from Taylor Jackson, with guitar by Kieran Bjornson and percussion by Brodie Hovanessian, who’s collaborated with local groups like Jamboree and Compost.

The track, like the whole 19-minute EP, burns slow and bright like a handrolled cigarette lit during a solar eclipse.

Written in the three years since Magnan moved to Winnipeg from Vancouver, Blue Hour was inspired at its start by the glow of an Osborne Village apartment filled with sunlight, incense and boisterous laughter.

Magnan’s partner had just left on tour, “and it got to that time of day after the sun set, but it isn’t dark yet, just indigo blue,” she says. “That’s when I found it hardest to be by myself. But then, the more I thought about it, I knew there was an ending to it. It’s not like I was stuck in it, exactly.”

The album’s title track — “like all my songs do” — started as a voice memo on Magnan’s phone.

“It was really soft, just acoustic, and then Brodie and I first started jamming together. We kind of fleshed it out as something with an increased tempo, a strong drum beat, a nice bass line.

“We brought in Dylan MacDonald (Field Guide) to play lead guitar,” says the artist, whose song of the summer is Vancouver Island artist Ora Cogan’s Honey.

Earth Angel’s EP release show is tonight at the Times Change(d) High and Lonesome Club (234 Main St.) at 8 p.m., with support from Merin and with a cyanotype workshop by artist Seraphine Crowe.

Tickets are available for the Blue Hour release show for $23 on 3common.com. More show information is available on Magnan’s Instagram, @earthangel.4ever.

winnipegfreepress.com

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