Mar. 25, 2009 - Issue #701: Extinction Song

Great Lake Swimmers

This must be the place: Tony Dekker navigates Lost Channels

With Tony Dekker’s ethereal voice, and Erik Arnesen’s slight banjo teases, Great Lake Swimmers’ music is firmly rooted in place. It’s a metaphorical place, as well as a physical one. But it’s not a New York City or a Las Vegas kind of place. It’s quieter, where if you sit there listening, you hear the way water sounds dripping off a paddle or the way snow squeaks under foot. 

 

It isn’t news that the band has a penchant for recording in decidedly non-studio settings. Its self-titled debut was set to tape in an abandoned grain silo, while Bodies and Minds came to be in an old church. Lost Channels, set for release in a couple of days, was realized in a handful of locations throughout the Thousand Islands region, including Dark Island’s Singer Castle and the century-old Brockville Arts Centre. It’s about acoustics, but it’s also about capturing the ineffable essence of place. 

 

“Singer Castle is a full-blown, really cool looking castle, complete with secret passageways and 100 stories that go along with it,” Dekker says over the phone just before taking the stage in Cornerbrook, Newfoundland. “It was just a really great experience and that was important to me, for that to be part of the process of the recording.”

 

Despite this seemingly decided recording trajectory, it all just sort of happened, going hand in hand with Great Lake Swimmers’ sepia-hued melodies and lyrics. After five albums, it’s safe to say that the choice in place is shaped by the band’s music as much as the places shape its music.

 

“It’s been a pretty slow and steady build for our band and I think that everything’s that happened so far has happened really organically,” Dekker explains.”It hasn’t been a flash in the pan kind of thing, but definitely the last couple of years, I’ve felt that we’ve been able to step into that role, step into that more creative role.” 

 

If your creative door is open, opportunity doesn’t have to knock too often or too loudly. And when Greg Kohs approached Dekker after a gig in Philadelphia, asking if the band would like to score his documentary Song Sung Blue, he was open to the idea.

 

“I don’t usually try to write songs for soundtracks, so it’s not like a regular gig for me,” he says. “The film ended up being such a special great film, so I knew right away that I wanted to be a part of it, so I dedicated some time to start composing the soundtrack.”

 

Writing music for a film about Lightning & Thunder, a Milwaukee Neil Young tribute band, was not standard operating procedure, however.

“It was a definitely a different creative process altogether, because the theme was already provided; the idea was already there. Usually the idea is the spark of the song, and that’s the tough part to come up with. It was actually really gratifying to be able to already use those ideas, but try to enhance the mood that was happening,” he says. “We had a great opportunity to set up the screen in the studio, and I actually got to play music to the film as we were watching it, to just try to come up with ideas, and that’s a pretty great way to be able to work on music for a film—rather than finding music that already exists and placing it to it, you can create it to the actual film.” V 

Fri, Mar 27 (7 pm)
Great Lake Swimmers
With Kate Maki
McDougall United Church, $18 (all ages)

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