CHANCE INSPIRATION

Eva Foote has new album

We can thank a random stranger on a bus ride to Toronto for the title of Eva Foote’s latest album, Funeral Walking.

The Edmonton-born singersongwriter was travelling between Toronto and Montreal, where she studies at the National Theatre School, when she found herself spilling her guts to a fellow passenger.

“We just struck up a conversation and I was telling him a lot of things that you wouldn’t necessarily say to someone you don’t know about how my first year at school was very lonely,” she recalls with a wry laugh. “He then said this very quotable francophone thing; he said, ‘You sound like you’re funeral walking.’ I immediately wrote that down.”

The rather expressive phrase took on more meaning for the 19-year-old Foote as she began going through a backlog of songs, written while immersing herself in drama lessons. In January of this year she finished a batch of her folky, melancholy tunes and sent them off to producer and bassist Harry Gregg back in Edmonton. Gregg listened, made some suggestions on how to record them, and when Foote reappeared back in Edmonton in May after the school year they made the trek over to the Audio Department to record what would become Funeral Walking.

The duo enlisted many of Edmonton’s best and brightest young musicians for Foote’s second effort, including guitarist Billie Zizi, drummer Matt Blackie, as well as fellow singer-songwriters Andrea Vissia and Ariana Brophy. Since Foote was needed back in school for early September they were compelled to record over a quick, 10-day session, diligently bottling up her Montreal experiences in a shiny Edmonton container.

“It was a strange thing,” she muses. “If I’m sad in Edmonton there’s at least an emotional confine imposed on it, because it’s familiar. In Montreal there’s nothing familiar, nothing to ground me or remind me of who I am. It was disorienting being sad far away rather than feeling sad in Edmonton.” She laughs at how she’s sounding. “The many chapters of feeling sad.”

This doesn’t mean that Foote was lying in a fetal position on the floor when not at school. Montreal may have brought out mournful feelings in her songwriting, but she still found time to soak up the more idiosyncratic features of the city.

“The balcony above had fallen down onto mine, on it so it was like compound balcony. There was shattered glass and classic brick rubble all over it, and chicken wire so you wouldn’t fall off it. There was also a piece of umbrella fastened to keep the poles in place. I would sit there and write songs on that dump of a balcony. There was a sense of community in sitting on the balcony doing my intimate thing in a public realm, because that’s what other people were doing as well: having sex, smoking, playing guitar, having dinner. All on the balcony.”

After her record release Foote almost immediately has to get back to Montreal for the start of the new school year. She’ll be back on a schedule of six days a week worth of classes, with many days going well into the evening. And, of course, she’ll be writing songs as well, which seems to be as much a compulsion as acting, something that she’ll be doing regardless of anything else in her life.

“Part of the mandate of National Theatre School is that it instils momentum into actors, and if I want to continue the momentum of long days and classes I need to make something happen,” she says. “In terms of a business plan, what I’m doing with this record makes no sense; I’m spending all the money I earned over the summer on it, but I can’t tour or do much press, because I’ll be leaving soon. If I distilled it down to what it means to me, I guess it’s an archive, an audio journal or a document. I’m happy I did it.”