SOUND RETURN TO LAND OF TALK
Elizabeth Powell’s journey to a more centred place captured on new album
It was a fitting metaphor to have to track Elizabeth Powell down by phone in Orillia, Ont. The former Montrealer with the otherworldly coo has had an elusive relationship with the spotlight over the past decade, seemingly ever on the verge of breaking out yet never quite comfortable with the idea.
In 2010, the metaphor was her voice itself, which gave out following her band Land of Talk’s tour with Canadian indie-rock royalty Broken Social Scene, on which she performed double duty as opening act and main attraction, filling in for Broken Social Scene members Feist and Amy Millan.
Then in 2011, Powell simply disappeared. She retreated to her family cottage in Lake Couchiching — which her great-great-great grandmother and her brothers built in 1887 — before settling in sleepy Orillia, where her parents live. Nearly six years later, she’s still there.
“I call it living here,” she said, Tuesday morning. “I have a little house. I have a life here . ... This place is nowhere to most people, (which is fine because) you kind of need to be nowhere, to be isolated in order to give attention to what’s inspiring you, or to get inspired. Either way, I think being on something natural like a lake, surrounded by cedars and birch and a lot of animals, you’re really simplifying things. Everyone should try it. If you’re in the city, take a walk on the mountain. I just did an extreme version of that, going nowhere to centre myself.”
Powell’s retreat was interrupted when her father suffered a stroke in January 2013, throwing real-life urgency at her existential quandary. There was other stuff, personal things she’d rather not go into, which added fuel to the fire.
Her return to a more centred place is captured on Land of Talk’s transportive new album, Life After Youth, a languorously pretty, guitar feedback-driven odyssey through intuitive emotional landscapes.
Her father is doing much better now, Powell said, explaining that his recovery pushed her to confront her own demons.
“It’s so neat to watch how the brain, body and spirit of a person can revive,” she said. “To see his resilience in action, I couldn’t help but see my own potential, or anyone’s, to get through things. It’s a really beautiful lesson. Watching him come back helped me to come back to some things I had abandoned or let die. It was hard but really lifeaffirming to go through with him.”
When she finally got up the nerve to begin recording songs again, her father’s health was never far from her mind.
“I would play these looping chord progressions over and over again,” she said, “put a drum track to it and start singing, vocalizing to it, ‘Oooh! aaaah!’, kind of yelping . ... Then I would play them for my dad and we would just sit there and listen. He’d rock back and forth and get a nice look in his eye and I’d know it was worth pursuing.
“It made it hard to add lyrics. I didn’t want them to get in the way of the feeling, or interrupt the meditative blank slate. I just wanted to create this uplifting vibe, like if this music plays in a room and you walk in, I just want you to feel like the music’s got you.”
Though there’s a soothing backbone to Life After Youth, there is no lack of grit. Powell can’t leave her grunge-rock influences far behind, and her cascading guitar textures are given free rein on the album.
In late 2015, when it was time to get serious about the recording, she turned to old friend and collaborator Jace Lasek, owner of Montreal’s Breakglass Studios and leader of acclaimed psych-rock act Besnard Lakes, recruiting his wife and bandmate Olga Goreas to play bass and original Land of Talk drummer Mark “Bucky” Wheaton on drums.
“To make a record again with Jace and Oggie (Olga) was huge to me,” Powell said. “He has always treated me as an equal and just let me be the musician I know I can be.”
Then, just when she thought she knew how the album was shaping up, fate stepped in and added another level of awesome. One day, out of the blue, Powell got a call from John Agnello, the veteran American producer whose credits include Dinosaur Jr., The Breeders, Sonic Youth and Kurt Vile.
“He called me after we had played a show in Toronto last summer,” Powell said. “He said, ‘This is John Agnello. I love your voice and your songs. I fell in love with (the song) This Time. Please, can we make a record together? If not, can I help mix it?’ I couldn’t believe it. Obviously, it was due to a bit of industry stuff. But I like to think the music found him, and he heard my call. I love the guy. I don’t ever want to stop working with him.”
While Powell was in New Jersey with him, Agnello called in former Sonic Youth Drummer Steve Shelley and Roxy Music/Sparks bassist Sal Maida to lend a hand, and Powell got some vocal and lyric-tweaking help from pal Sharon Van Etten.
Now, with the album done and a nearly sold-out Montreal show just a few weeks away, Powell is looking at her resurging career with a renewed sense of possibility.
“I feel like I’m coming back,” she said. “I’ve been through a lot of things and learned a lot about myself and people. I feel like I’m coming back to music.”