Sep. 10, 2008 - Issue #673: Sex in the City 2008
Wendy McNeill
Wendy McNeill returns with A Dreamer's Guide To Hardcore Living
These are hospitable surroundings for dreamers, climatic mutability drawing out fanciful notions and rambling thoughts—long grey winters nurturing interiority and intimacy; short velvety summers giving way to delight and celebration.
But the world demands something tougher of dreamers than self-preservation. To complete the circuit of creation, there has to be an engagement with the world, the day-to-day effort of living. McNeill delivers this philosophy in the title of her new album, A Dreamer’s Guide To Hardcore Living.
“I knew the theme of the record for a while, and I knew what to call it,” she ventures. “I wanted the feeling of being a dreamer, to say that dreaming was important, but I also wanted to add this hardcore element with the content of the tunes.”
The songwriter’s not adding punk riffs to her distinctive accordion-driven gems. Dreamer’s Guide bends in a fuller, more Euro-orchestral pop direction than her previous album, 2006’s The Wonder Show, but it encompasses the rich vein of dark, glossy cabaret-folk she’s been striking since 2004’s Such A Common Bird. Instead, McNeill’s reaching for an emotional quality to lend her musical tales. “There’s a Margaret Fuller quote I was working with while I was writing and making this: ‘Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must not be out of proportion to his waking,’” she sighs. “You know, it’s like, ‘Be open-minded but not so open your brains fall out’!” McNeill emits a honey-sweetened chuckle.
The Wonder Show was a transition album. McNeill, long one of those peripatetic Edmontonians, leaving and returning like a comet with an erratic orbit, had departed for a life in Sweden with her new love. The record’s full of biography—the songs are a parade of strong female characters drawn from history or her own experience—and she accompanied them with her unique palette of attic instrument sounds and her expressive voice. There were guests on tracks, but Wonder was largely a one-woman affair, in which McNeill “tried on” several feminine personas.
“I think my operative phrase was ‘wonder.’” She mugs a wide-eyed doe voice: “‘Where am I? Golly, what is all this?’ Everything was new; I was bombarded with new people and places. I was reading biographies, trying to understand places I was going to, the history of some of those places.”
Dreamer’s is the product of a different practice. “It was a well-thought-out creation, ” McNeill offers. “The musicians and producer were really hands-on. It was a very natural, uninhibited and fun experience. We rehearsed the shit out of the songs, but we’d do them differently every time, recording in this barn in Sweden live to tape. The producer was this mad scientist, in the best of ways. He’s totally into analogue, so they’re ‘natural’ songs, but with a weird filmic sensibility and no shortage of plings and plongs. It wasn’t about perfection—if the mood was there, that was the take.”
The album resembles a collection of fables, magic realism in song. Animals and humans struggle against and in defense of their natures as they tango between longing for freedom and the constant labour and reward of loving another being, between self-deceit and reckoning. McNeill’s deft language is enhanced by a musical landscape that weaves a host of orchestral textures and layers of her vocals together, exquisitely aching and beautifully realized.
Dreamer’s will have a second life in Edmonton: “Our show here has two-and-a-half sets. CBC’s recording, so we’re doing the whole album. We’ll recreate it beginning to end, with a short break for a video show and some more songs.” V
Sun, Sept 14 (8 pm)
Wendy McNeill
The ARTery, $10
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