Solo album built on collaboration

Dominique Adams doesn’t mind playing the waiting game.

Many of the vignette-driven lyrics, gentle harmonies and mesmerizing vocal runs that populate the local songwriter’s debut record, To Keep, were in Adams’ back pocket for as long as a decade. The title track wraps around a piece of advice her vocal teacher Jeanette Gallant gave her in 2016 when Adams was a music student in Red Deer, Alta.: keep yourself and don’t look behind.

And even though the record — captured in Winnipeg at Liam Duncan’s Better Daze Studios — was released last July, Adams is only getting around to celebrating it with an official release show tonight at Sidestage, opening with a circle of songwriters — Cassidy Mann, Sam Fournier, Laura June Rose and Jacob Brodovsky — sharing their music with the crowd.

That group approach to performance is typical for Adams, who learned to sing, perform and arrange in choral and musical theatre settings during her upbringing in Edmonton. Family gatherings routinely wound down with sing-alongs, her brother on the piano and her father on the guitar. If there’s a reason Adams prefers to bide her time, it’s because the artist would rather jam with a pack.

“To me, this feels like the opposite of a solo record,” says Adams, who moved to Winnipeg in November 2022 to live in the same city as her partner, guitarist Austin Parachoniak.

“Before moving to Winnipeg, I was mostly interested in group-oriented music-making because I felt then — I know it’s not like this now — that the solo artist adventure felt a bit more self-serving. But this record really only came to be because of the community I met and made in Winnipeg.

“Before coming here, I was pretty resistant to lean into a solo career because it did feel isolating and not quite right to me. But in Winnipeg everyone was doing it, and that made it feel so much less self-driven. Everything that was being made was so collaborative.”

Almost as soon as she made the cross-provincial trek, Adams was playing in living rooms and songwriter rounds with artists such as Madeleine Roger, Noah Derksen, Fontine and Brodovsky, with whom she’s formed a steadily performing folk duo.

“To Keep doesn’t feel like a ‘me’ record. It’s always felt shared, and that makes me feel so sure that I’m leaning into the right thing,” she says.

In making the album, Adams enlisted Duncan, Parachoniak and pianist Keiran Placatka (Parachoniak and Placatka both play with William Prince as part of the Funky Miracles) to record it at Better Daze Studios, Duncan’s home base in Bruce Park.

Using an eight-track tape machine, the quartet recorded live off the floor, a high-wire method that didn’t allow anything to be hidden, requiring the first four tracks to be recorded in an uninterrupted 12-minute take.

“The last thing I made (a self-titled 2021 EP, available for $1 on Adams’ Bandcamp page) had this process of multi-tracking, and I’d have a couple different people come in and it would completely change how the song was depending on which part they were playing,” she says. “I just wanted to live-arrange with the band and not be stressed with which direction to take things after the song.

“I was really interested in being in the moment with the music and letting the songs exist as they were.”

“You can hear Keiran switching from one instrument to another halfway through a song, you can hear chairs squeak and a cat meow,” producer Duncan wrote in a step-by-step recollection of the recording process on his Church of Better Daze newsletter, available through Substack.

The group approach to songcraft employed by Adams and company is made especially clear through the interlude tracks., starting with dom plays the intro and continuing with keiran plays the organ and kieran plays the piano.

Rendered in lowercase, like many voice notes and demo recordings, these contributions lift the veil, giving the listener insight into the instrumental components of the tracks that follow while also giving the session players much-deserved recognition.

Despite the skilful collaborators on To Keep, the record’s star is undoubtedly Adams, who not only wrote each titled song but arranged them as well, drawing on her background in chorus. The result is a record that feels like a handwritten note to past and future selves, stuck to the refrigerator door with an inherited magnet.

Adams is a fan of Laura Marling and Carole King; the influences of both artists are clear especially on tracks such as Would You Tell Me Why? and Living, which make the record’s second side a powerhouse counterpart to the first, which gives the sense, through repeat listening, of a gentle invitation to cross the transom.

As the record progresses, Adams — who plays Festival du Voyaguer on Feb. 15 and opens for William Prince at the Centennial Concert Hall on April 25 — kicks off her shoes, with every intention to stay for a while.

Adams says that the album is “an ode to the things we collect from the people in our lives.” Sometimes, as illustrated by Erik M. Grice’s on the record’s collaged cover, those items are tangible — a favourite coffee cup or a jotted note from a loved one — but just as often they’re fleeting feelings, shared moments and hand-me-down punchlines.

“Over time, you realize those little things are the ones that make us who we are,” Adams says.

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman