Elliott Brood digging up songs from the past
Moves can be moments of rediscovery, uncovering grade school report cards under the cobwebs in a ragged box, childhood snapshots in a water-stained photo album.
For the three members of the Juno-winning countryfolk trio Elliott Brood, moving to Hamilton from Toronto meant rediscovering longlost songs. Five to be exact, demos they had recorded almost 15 years ago and then forgotten about, never released on any of their five albums.
The demos were rough, but the songwriting strong, and fit surprisingly well with a batch of new ones they were working on. They were simply too good to leave undone, so they made fresh recordings of the old material.
Those five songs now make up the core of Elliott Brood’s new album “Ghost Gardens.”
“The whole idea behind ‘Ghost Gardens’ is something that is forgotten, much like old houses where somebody has moved on but perennial gardens keep coming up year after year even though the people who used to live there are gone,” said Elliott Brood singer Mark Sasso on tour stop in Los Angeles where the group recently played The Bootleg Theatre.
“That’s what those songs are. They were still there year after year, but we didn’t really know about them or think about them because we had moved on.”
The move to Hamilton had come in stages for the members of Elliott Brood. Sasso first made the move in 2009, followed a couple of years later by drummer Stephen Pitkin, then by guitarist Casey Laforet. With all three in Hamilton, the band decided to rent a rehearsal/ studio space downtown. The newly arrived Laforet brought all his gear to the new building and started to unpack.
“There had been gear in his place in Toronto for a long time and in a bag we found an old hard drive,” Sasso explained. “We had saved some demos on it that we had done, so we gave them a listen. What we found was that the demos weren’t great but the songs were really good and deserved their time in the sun.”
Elliott Brood is known for the dark places their songs tend to travel, and “Ghost Gardens” is no exception. The album starts out in an upbeat, country-jamboree manner with “Til the Sun Comes Up Again.” The upbeat tempo continues on “Dig a Little Hole,” but the lyrical content turns dark and descends into a nightmarish story of a lost child in the wilderness.
Sasso says the theme derives from an old man the trio met several years ago while hiking in Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta. The man’s name was T.S. Armstrong, which is the title of the ninth track of “Ghost Gardens.”
“We met him at the top of a mountain and I wrote a song about him that week,” Sasso says. “It all had to do with the wilderness that we were experiencing. He was lecturing us in a good way about bears and things like that. So I was playing with the idea of things that can happen to people in the wild … It was also about the same time (eight-yearold) Tori Stafford went missing in Woodstock.”
The album’s dark storyline is aided by a starkness of instrumentation — gentle banjo, guitar, piano and percussion.
“Our whole goal was to cut things back and be as minimalist as we could, to let the songs breathe and have their moment with just the right instrumentation. I feel the space makes the contrast that much better and allows the listener to focus on the essence of the song.”
The album was recorded in Elliott Brood’s Hamilton rehearsal spot, a place the group members now call the office.
“We’d drop our kids at school, meet there at 9:30 in the morning, have a coffee and discuss some stuff, then start to working, and by 2:30 p.m. finish up and go pick our kids up from school,” Sasso said.
Elliott Brood is now on a North American tour promoting “Ghost Gardens,” with a stop at Waterloo’s Starlight Social Club on Thursday, Oct. 26 and two shows at Hamilton’s Mills Hardware on Nov. 9 and 10 (the Nov. 10 show is sold out).
Sasso says the experience of finding the lost songs of “Ghost Gardens,” will force the band to go back and look for other forgotten demos.
“Obviously this is going to push us to go back and revisit demos more often, look for things,” Sasso says. “You just don’t know. Those songs just needed to ruminate for awhile and we needed to have our separation and grow to do what those songs needed.”