Jul. 28, 2010 - Issue #771: Young at Heart

On the Record

Straight from the heart

Colleen Brown looks back at her sophomore album, Foot in Heart

Colleen Brown has been busy for, well, a long time now. Her second solo album, Foot in Heart, saw the light of day back in 2008, and she's worked the record plenty in the time since, both on the road and at home with her band, while simultaneously turning the volume up to 11 as one part of the classic-rock influenced Secretaries, leading to a long-awaited full-length from that group as well.

 

Then, in 2010, singer-songwriter Emm Gryner latched onto Foot in Heart and re-released it on her label, giving the album one more kick. For her part, Brown is showing no signs of slowing down, with a show at the Empress Ale House this week, a series of performances at the Edmonton Folk Fest after that and then an October run opening up for Crash Test Dummies. Brown took some time recently to look back on the creation of Foot in Heart.

VUE WEEKLY: How long did it take to make Foot in Heart, from the initial songwriting through to the end of the recording?

COLLEEN BROWN: The album process was a good three years. Some of the songs from Foot in Heart were written as far back as 2004, like "Fantastic Feeling," for example, which was written just after my first album A Peculiar Thing was completed (just before it was released). We started recording in the fall of 2006, so the recording process was over a full year.

VW: When you were writing the songs, did you come at them in a particular way? Lyrics first? Music first?

CB: Most of the time I write lyrics first. Usually I'll have a full set of lyrics, and they'll suggest a melody and then I think about what kind of feel I want the song to have and try to match the music/chords up with all of that. It's rare for me to come up with melodies or music first, though sometimes that does happen. And then there are the songs that just appear from the ether ...

VW: What were the recording sessions like for this album? Did you record as a band live off the floor or did you piece it together one track at a time? Why?

CB: The plan was to record everything live off the floor, and we did that to start, but then we slowly began adding and overdubbing parts. We gave ourselves a lot of freedom to experiment with strings, horns, vocals, guitar sounds, etc. It was a very satisfying process for me, especially with the vocal arrangements. We even ended up banging on the furnace in Ian Martin's basement to get some percussion sounds—which I think basically made the track "Now That I've Found You." That's the kind of thing that only happens when you leave yourself a little room to experiment.

VW: Were there any other songs written that were left off the album?

CB: Oh, of course. I'd written something like 40 new songs by this point—not all of them were songs I really wanted people to hear though! We actually recorded the bed tracks for another song called "I Only Want to Dance With You." It sounded good, but I was determined only to put songs on the record that I really loved and that fit in with my theme, as the idea of making the album an arc of a romantic relationship was really starting to solidify for me.

VW: How did you decide which songs to include on the album? Did you have an idea of what you wanted Foot in Heart to be when you started, or did the finished shape emerge as the writing and recording went along?

CB: Doug Organ and I had whittled away at a song list that was closer to 25 songs I was interested in recording, and settled on the 13 songs we were going to record (including the one cover song "I Can't Make You Love Me"). The idea of the theme came, along with the album title, while I was on tour across Canada in 2006—I did a solo tour from Edmonton to Toronto, so I had a lot of driving time to think about things like that. The details were ironed out in the studio though.

VW: Foot in Heart was originally released a couple of years ago, but this year Emm Gryner re-released it on her Dead Daisy Records imprint. What has it been like returning to the album and supporting it as a new release for a second time? Have the songs taken on different lives for you now that you've known them for so long?

CB: I guess that I'd started to focus more on the Secretaries stuff by the time Emm Gryner started contacting me about Foot in Heart. In fact, I had really resigned that the album had lived its life and was going to sit on the shelf. I'm really thrilled that we've been able to get the album into hands I had no access to with my independent release. I still love these songs, I still think the recording sounds great sonically and I still really enjoy performing them, for the most part. I just played a show in Halifax where half the room sang along to "Love You Baby." People are starting to respond when they hear the start of "Love You Baby" and "Boyfriend," which to me is a real thrill. I've been on tour for most of the last three months, and I can see a pretty steady progression of recognition for the music, which is really heartening.

When we put together our set lists now, it's approximately half new material, and half recorded material, and that latter half has shifted and evolved quite a bit. I hope that always continues to happen. I think I'll be performing songs from Foot in Heart in the live sets for years to come, so we'll always have to leave room for the songs to grow and change. The day we start to stagnate I'll have to consider opening that bakery/organic booze haunt I've been dreaming about!

VW: If you were to trace the musical map that led you to Foot in Heart, what would it look like?

CB: Sacred and folk songs; classical music lessons; musical theatre; Top-40 hot country(!); '90s indie rock; Tori Amos; '60s and '70s classic rock ... more or less that's how I got to where I was when we recorded. Now I'm listening to a lot more current artists—everywhere I go friends and acquaintances are feeding me new music, which is really exciting, as well as sometimes daunting. But it makes me work harder. It makes me think more about why I'm doing music, which is really because I love to perform—I love the exchange of energy. I'm trying to write songs now that are the kind of music I want to perform. V

Wed, Aug 4 (9:30 pm)
Colleen Brown
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