Singer rebuilds a farm and herself

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This article was published 12/10/2017 (3204 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After pouring her soul into the massive double album Land and Sea and then touring the record for a full three years, Canadian songstress Sarah Slean was burned out. During the same period, she and her husband of five years, singer-songwriter Royal Wood, divorced.

When Slean returned home to Toronto after the tour, she knew she needed to take a break from everything — a decision that materialized in the form of a farmhouse she purchased in northern Ontario. It became a place of respite from her physical and emotional fatigue, where she could “watch the daylight change” and “just be still,” she explains during a recent phone interview with the Free Press.

“I needed to put my hands in the earth and watch a plant grow and remember what it feels to witness dusk and the wind in the trees. I just needed to reconnect with the source of creativity, which for me is the spirit and presence in nature, which sometimes we can completely ignore or forget about.”

And she did reconnect — reconnect with her music, with her fans and, as cliché as it is to say, with herself.

Prior to her Winnipeg concert on Sunday, Oct. 15, at the West End Cultural Centre, Slean opened up to the Free Press about how her farmhouse became a metaphor for her life and how it helped re-ignite her passion for music, which lead to the creation of her new album, Metaphysics.

FP: I read that you had a bit of an Under the Tuscan Sun moment and moved to an old fixer-upper in rural Ontario — what did that time away from the city do for you?

Sarah Slean: Ha! Under the Northern Ontario Sun… slightly less glamorous.

I bought this farm; it was a very sick old house that I nurtured back to health and I feel like the metaphor was apt. Any minor cosmetic change I tried to make to the house revealed deeper problems that needed addressing. So eventually I decided it was a gut job, went back to the studs and rebuilt this house. When I went there, my project was to rebuild Sarah and think about the next path to go down because I was really fed up with music, to be perfectly honest. I had put all of my energy, my heart and soul into that double album that was a culmination of maybe every artistic dream I’ve ever had… I just felt like it was something that had really come to fruition and I didn’t know where to go after that… But I think the process of rebuilding that house restored my connection to music and what is real about that connection.

FP: Speaking of connecting, in a way, I was keeping tabs on your Pledge Music campaign for this album and it was intense. You did so much work with all the handmade items and I feel like it must have been rewarding in the way that you’re like, ‘OK that was a lot of fun but let’s never do it again.’

SS: (Laughs) Nail on the head. You know, there’s an aspect of it which I thought was so wonderful and that is you can invite people — your dear supporters, the people who are really moved and changed by what you do — and you can invite them into every step of the process. Not an over-share, but you can really curate the things that they can experience.

I feel like, at this point, I know what they would love — and that’s the backstories to these songs, the philosophical awakenings in me that gave rise to some of the songs… I don’t really write songs because it’s time to write an album, I write songs because something in me has shifted and if I have to wait for that, or if I have to live some more life or get kicked around by life a little more, or go travel or whatever, I will do that because really I can’t court the muse any other way.

The pledge thing: I get to show them those things, and that is the meaning for them. They feel like they know the songs and they get to come with me as the songs are made, and we show them all the behind-the-scenes footage and things they were super-crazy about, but at the same time, I’m a one-woman show because, frankly, I find it difficult to trust people in the music industry, so I try to do it all myself… and it’s a lot, maybe too much, but I feel like that kind of intensity is necessary to keep that connection with your fans alive and keep it genuine.

FP: I also really appreciate the way you interact with your fans on Facebook. A lot of artist pages will have a post saying, ‘Name your favourite song for a chance to win tickets!’ but your page is like, ‘You know what? No. Tell me about the fundamental nature of reality.’

SS: (Laughs) There’s a lot of music for the masses out there and the marketing strategy there is always lowest common denominator. I’ve always found that really insulting. I’m an intelligent, engaged human being and I feel like a lot of my fans are, so I don’t want to insult their intelligence and I feel that they are also interested, thoughtful members of the human race and so I treat them as such.

FP: There’s a lot of references to God and spirituality and higher powers, or a lack thereof, on Metaphysics — are you approaching those topics purely on a philosophical level, or is there some personal searching in there, as well?

SS: Oh I’ve always been really, really… that’s my zone. I was deeply attracted to religious music as a child and gospel, like Mahalia Jackson. Not the sort of Christian rock or anything, but very fascinated by the human spiritual urge, or the need to develop a narrative that is all-encompassing, that explains the micro to the macro, that explains the horrifying evil and jaw-dropping benevolence and everything in-between. And I feel like that need is uniquely human. It’s something that makes us what we are and I also think it’s the source of so much strife; the need (is there) to be able to write it down, like, ‘This is the story of the universe and this is why good things happen and why bad things happen.’ And once you delineate that you start to make in groups and out groups and then all hell breaks loose — and I find that so interesting. The lyric in Holy Ground is,’God is looking in the mirror in the fathomless depths of your eyes.’ And I feel like, to me, the story of God needs to be not a story, it needs to be a living presence that is undefinable, because the moment you attach words and narrative to it, it makes tribes and we know how that ends up.

I don’t know if humans can do that, but I’m fascinated by the promise that we can come to some consensus that doesn’t delineate, a consensus that agrees to be vague, agrees to hold a multiplicity. I don’t know if we can do that but I feel like we’re going to have to.

FP: One song I wanted to ask you about was Sarah. To me, it kind of felt like a pep-talk to yourself, but I was wondering if you could break it down a bit.

SS: That was the song that broke the seal, so to speak. That one started to come out at the farm, and that was the one where I was like, “Oh, is music coming back to me?” And then it did. I had been digesting a failed relationship, a failed marriage, and I had met an incredibly intense, troubled older artist and we sort of had a thing, not really a romantic thing but just a really powerful collision and I guess the takeaway was, “It’s still in me, this massive capacity for love is still there.”

Over the years, when you feel like you’ve been unable to love or you’ve been disappointed in love, or you think, ‘What is wrong with me, why don’t I just pair up like everyone else? Why can’t I seem to do this?” and you think, “Well, I guess it’s going to be me and my songs and that’s that.” But that collision with that man sort of reminded me that massive universe of love force is still there, it’s just this bottomless well in everyone, I think. Sometimes I think the muse for me is this third-party voice that is always telling me, “It’s not over yet. The story is underway; this isn’t the end of the story!” and I feel like The Right Words, which is from the Sea record of Land and Sea, I feel like that is the same source, the muse was the same kind of consoling voice then.

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @NireRabel