COUNTRY SINGER BUCKS NASHVILLE TRADITIONS
Mariel Buckley ’s song Jumping the Fence seems to tell a typical rock ’n’ roll tale of desperate young lovers.
The narrator is tired of being a “dirty little secret,” but her lover’s gun-toting father is sure to run her out of town if they are discovered. Backed by a blues vibe that recalls Bonnie Raitt, Buckley sings “I don’t want to run every time the door creaks and if I see your daddy, gotta run like hell.”
A forbidden romance. A guntoting daddy. A narrator desperate to let her love live out in the open. Riding a cool groove and well-crafted melody, it has all the hallmarks of a good old-fashioned story song that, on the surface, may seem more darkly romanticized than personal.
But Buckley insists Jumping the Fence is a “very real story” that reaches back to what was presumably a harrowing time in her formative years.
“I obviously embellished a few details,” says the Calgary singersongwriter, in an interview with Postmedia. “But there’s not a lot in that song that isn’t true. I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been with someone I shouldn’t have been there with. It was pretty intense. I was pretty young. I was only 15. It was a pretty life-shaping experience.”
Buckley chooses not to expand on the story, saying she doesn’t want to get into how this perilous romance eventually turned out.
But Jumping the Fence seems a perfect example of the balance she achieves on her sophomore record, Driving in the Dark, which wraps the deeply personal in enough assured songcraft to make most songs sound like classics waiting to be discovered. From the perfectly constructed, sorrowful ballad I’m a Fool, to the country-swing gallop of Pride and the brooding guitarpop of the title track, Buckley has a knack for bending traditional song forms into something more intimate. The songs on Driving in the Dark mostly sprang from some form of raw turmoil in her life, although she doesn’t get too specific about what that entailed.
“Songwriting can be lots of things for lots of people and I’m trying to expand the field of what that means,” says Buckley, who will play a sold-out show on Friday at Festival Hall. “I wouldn’t say I’m a person who has an easy time going through change. I’ve battled some pretty real stuff in my life and this album was a big shift in the way that I am able to communicate with other people. The vulnerability coming out on the record —I mean I’ m proud of it—but it was intense to get through as well.”
Even songs where Buckley clearly takes on another persona — such as the impoverished Indigenous man struggling to feed his son amid racism and unemployment in the haunting Stray Dogs — are personal.
“I don’t know how those narratives come about; I come by it very honestly,” she says. “I feel a lot of empathy for people that can’t express themselves in certain ways. I take it on and allow it to evolve in certain ways. There are a number of songwriters who do that really well, who are able to tell you a story that you’ve heard a hundred times and through a different character but you feel like it’s them. John Prine is an example of that. He can tell a story, but you still feel there’s big elements of him throughout the story.”
For those used to seeing Buckley perform acoustically or with limited backing, opening track Wait will seem a significant sonic evolution, a slow-burning, guitarheavy stomp with swirling organ and a rock beat. Produced by fellow singer-songwriter Leeroy Stagger at his Rebeltone Ranch in Lethbridge, Driving In the Dark has a full-bodied band sound. Buckley met Stagger at a songwriting panel in Calgary and they quickly became friends. He told her he didn’t see her making a country record in the traditional sense and that he had some ideas for her next record.
And now, separating Buckley from the Nashville-approved acts seems a main thrust of the promotional material for Driving in the Dark.
“I think country is such a doubleedged term right now. It can sound like blasphemy to a lot of people in the industry, especially people who are doing more of the fringy alt-country or even outlaw stuff,” Buckley says. “The word country itself has sort of lost its validity. Which is kind of silly, because country covers such a wide gamut. For me, it’s not that I don’t want to make country music; country is obviously the genre I fit more comfortably into. It’s just that I didn’t want to make a traditional country record. I didn’t want to make the record I already made. It was moving less towards Loretta Lynn and more toward Lucinda Williams.”
Buckley released her debut album, 2014’s Motorhome, after developing her skills in open-mic nights. The evolving musical tastes of her brother Tim — who heads Calgary’s T. Buckley Trio and is seven years her senior — were an early inspiration for her. She says she initially followed his journey step by step, whether it be discovering rap as a teenager or the Red Hot Chili Peppers later on.
“He got into folk and country when he started writing music,” she says. “I would have been still in high school. He was getting into folk and country and Neil Young and that’s when I was also picking it up. All of my introduction to music has been through Tim until the last four or five years, when I found my own identity as a writer and started to discover music on my own.”
For Driving in the Dark, Buckley looked to Kathleen Edwards’ 2003 debut Failer and Patty Griffin’s 1998 record Flaming Red as sonic touchstones. But the songs are uniquely her own. Unlike a number of country performers with considerable songwriting skills, Buckley has no immediate plans to decamp to Nashville and start collaborating on songs to feed Music City’s hit-making machinery.
“I’m hoping to do a lot more travelling and touring and a trip to Nashville is definitely in my future,” she says. “But Calgary is my home and Alberta is my home and I feel my roots are tied here. So I don’t see myself moving too far from Alberta. But those trips to those places where some of the songwriters I’m emulating are going to be really important to my growth as an artist for sure.”
Mariel Buckley plays Festival Hall on Friday. The show is sold out.
I’ve battled some pretty real stuff in my life and this album was a big shift in the way that I am able to communicate with other people.