Mar. 26, 2008 - Issue #649: My Name is Rachel Corrie
Ann Vriend
Ann Vriend is just a spy like us
“Musically, I wanted it to be a little grander and more cinematic and film noir-y than my previous albums,” she admits over an early phone call after a late-night flight from Toronto back to Edmonton. “It’s a departure in a way from the more rootsy or organic sounding albums that I’ve done before, and that was also largely due to working with Doug [Romanow], who’s the producer. Not that he isn’t capable of doing the rootsy albums, but he and I both sort of saw the vision for this record being quite epic and cinematic—big.”
The two first met when Romanow spotted Vriend playing a gig at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto and asked if she’d like to co-write and demo a song with him. That experience led to another co-write a year later when Romanow was out in Calgary doing some production work, and when Vriend was ready to do the album he signed on as producer.
When We Were Spies finds Vriend digging deep into a metaphorical world of half-truths with her lyrics, complementing the dramatic soundscapes nicely. There’s a welcome consistency to the album in both sonics and theme, and that’s something that Vriend says she worked hard to hang on to as she put the songs together.
“I didn’t have them all written when I started the project,” she explains. “I had some of them written, and actually the one song that I wrote that gave me the metaphorical idea of espionage didn’t even make it on the album. But that doesn’t really matter—it gave me the idea. But I am sort of a person who doesn’t really like putting a whole bunch of songs on an album for no reason. I just think when you’re going to have album artwork and you’re going to have a look and you’re going to have a feel, a photo shoot and all that video material—it goes on and on—that’s a medium in itself.
“Because I’m a writer and I’m a literary songwriter I feel really compelled to play with that and to make the songs play off of each other more than just, ‘Oh, this is the next batch of 11 songs I wrote,’” she continues. “And so what happened was I went with that idea from the beginning and then there were the songs that Doug and I co-wrote and then adapted into that concept a little more, and then I wrote some specifically around that theme just to round out the album in terms of ... having a few more things that hadn’t really been represented musically yet.”
Vriend concedes that it’s sometimes difficult to leave a song off of an album, as was the case with the tune that sparked the whole idea for When We Were Spies.
“It’s hard because the very first line of it was ‘You were crying, I was hiding like a spy,’” she laughs. “It couldn’t be any more in your face, the theme right there, how being closed or secretive or untrustworthy or untrusting is going to lead to some turmoil in life.”
Still, she never counts a good song down for the count, keeping old ones around until she finds just the right home for them. On the new album, “St Paul” is a tune that she had written before 2005’s Modes of Transport.
“It just didn’t fit on that album because it didn’t really, sonically or lyrically, seem to belong there,” she explains. “Because of this idea that I have that albums should sort of hang together somewhat, there’s all sorts of songs that wait in the wings like that, and I just have to be more patient than with some of the other songs.”
The one song that Vriend recorded for the album that she had no hand in writing is a cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” although she thoroughly reinvents the tune as a sad lament rather than simply transporting Young’s famously biting and cynical electric version wholesale onto the album.
The songwriter admits that there was a time when she was not even a fan of Young’s work, back when she was in music school and she was all too aware of Young’s wavering voice and rough—sometimes brutal—playing. But her feelings have changed over the last eight years that she herself has been performing live.
“Nobody cares how you get there, you just have to get there,” she states. “What I mean is, nobody cares that he just played one note or that his singing is not technically perfect. People just want the music to really hit them and move them, and nobody cares how you arrive at that, how you can deliver it. They just care that you deliver it and if you don’t deliver it doesn’t matter how good a recording is or how nice your guitar is or how great a singer someone might be.
“All people want is you to deliver that thing that makes them have a shiver on the back of their neck. That’s it. And there’s a thousand ways to get there and every artist has their own weird, unique thing that they come up with to arrive there.” V
Sun, Mar 30 (8 pm)
Ann Vriend
Yardbird Suite, $18 or $28 with CD
http://www.myspace.com/annvriend
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