Singer Dana Wylie goes to ground with new album
A new sense of ‘groundedness’ leads to singer’s most arresting musical moments yet
Dana Wylie doesn’t make things easy for those of us who dissect music, but because she creates better songs than most, you keep thinking and keep listening.
You can call her a singer-songwriter but her disparate influences and past experiences with folk, bluegrass, blues and jazz makes her hard to pigeonhole. She plays acoustic and electric guitars, piano and keyboards and even penned horn or string arrangements for half the tracks on her latest album, but Wylie gives the biggest credit to her core rhythm section.
Her voice has an arresting purity that slides between strength and vulnerability, while her loose delivery takes unpredictable routes to the end of a phrase.
Because she writes about life, love, the world and everything, it might take a couple of plays before you fully appreciate the running thread of her latest album, but it’s there in the title: The Earth That You’re Made Of.
“I think the album happened quite organically,” Wylie allows, “but if there’s a theme that has emerged from this record it’s the idea of groundedness, and allowing yourself to be who and where you are. You’re also acknowledging that groundedness or being close to the earth involves an acceptance that nothing is permanent.”
She is also the mother of a young daughter and while she has yet to record anything specific about that experience, she admits it has had a definite impact on her life as a songwriter.
“I feel like becoming a mother five years ago was the beginning of a groundedness that has in some way come to fruition with this record. It’s a huge part of me whether I write about it or not.”
You may already have heard Wylie in some context without knowing it. Since she finished course work for her master’s degree in music from the University of Alberta two years ago, she has carved out her own multi-faceted niche on the local scene, adding her keyboards or voice to various side projects, venting early blues classics in The Alewives duo with Kirsten Elliott, and joining in the choir for Dan Shinan’s Mad Dogs Experience.
“It has taught me a lot about why so many of us continue to pursue music as our vocation, even in a world where that’s so hard, and about how music creates connections between people.”
Sometimes it feels like two separate careers.
“This divide has occurred in the past two years, where I have almost
exclusively played piano for other people, but when it comes to writing and performing my own stuff, that’s on guitar, almost exclusively in guitar-land.”
For much of the same period she also served as an assistant at the University of Alberta’s Sound Studies (formerly Folkways Alive!) office. It’s a job that brought her in touch with many folk traditions, and she’s still working on her master’s thesis, which takes off from music as a shared experience.
Wylie was preparing to be front and centre again this Friday to release The Earth That You’re Made Of with her core trio, horns and many of the same players from the album sessions.
It all started two years ago when she began collecting older songs and writing new ones, setting plans with Harry Gregg, who also co-produced her 2014 solo album, The Sea And The Sky.
Most of it was recorded live off the floor, Wylie singing and playing alongside Keith Rempel’s double bass and Daniel Stadnicki’s drums and percussion. She wanted that approach to avoid over-thinking her voice parts in a separate vocal overdub. The overdubs came later for special guests on horns (Bob Tildesley, Audrey Ochoa, Dave Babcock), a string quartet, harmony vocals (including Chloe Albert), fiddler Daniel Gervais, cellist Christine Hanson and others.
“I was going to make it more rushed but I came back to just serving the songs and getting the right people, and the basic trio was the foundation on the songs.”
She credits grants from the EAC and the AFA for allowing her to hire the horns and strings, but even with all those extras, Wylie’s voice and songwriting remain the highlight of the set.
Her opening track, Hallelujah Leonard Cohen Hallelujah, was recorded before Cohen’s death and is not a cover of his anthem, more of an uptempo echo of a songwriter’s struggles and joys, and a thank you to the man.
“It’s not so much a homage to Leonard Cohen,” Wylie explains, “but as a non-religious 21st-century western person, I just felt I had to address it to him because he gave us a secular hallelujah.”
One newer song, Dig In Your Roots and Grow, was inspired in part by the imagery of trees in a park in Taipei, Taiwan, trees with exposed roots that almost look like human hands. At points her words become reverent, on You Are Good, You Are Kind, about appreciating the better side of the people in our lives. Candour illuminates the more obvious love songs but they’re so much more.
“I feel as if I’m just finding my songwriter’s voice, and that I don’t feel so compelled to write songs about specific things as I used to. More and more, they are kind of about everything happening within yourself and out in the world, at that moment I find myself in when I need to write a song.”
Wylie grew up on a Saskatchewan farm and put in eight grades of conservatory piano studies. She wound up in Edmonton 20 years ago when she enrolled in MacEwan’s music-theatre program, but eventually she decided she was more comfortable in “the musicians’ tribe.” Following the spirit of adventure, she spent two years living and performing, first in Taiwan and then two years touring all over England with her own band, exploring British folk traditions along the way and recording, too. The two traditional folk songs on her new album are numbers she learned way back then.
Wylie’s second musical career really began when she returned here in 2010 to attend the U of A.