Jennifer Castle: death becomes her
Folk-pop album about mortality propels her to sell out the Danforth
While having one of the year’s most acclaimed albums under her belt is kind of old news to Jennifer Castle at this point, 2018 has added a pleasant twist to the familiar story: it would now appear that it’s not just music critics who are listening.
Castle and her band will wind the year down with a sold-out show alongside recent Polaris Music Prize winner Jeremy Dutcher at the 1,400-capacity Danforth Music Hall this Saturday, Dec. 15, which is no small accomplishment for a writerly singer/songwriter whose most recent album, Angels of Death, is a hushed folk-pop song cycle about the inevitability of mortality and our ultimate insignificance within the great river of time.
She knows it’s an accomplishment. Flirting with the beginnings of a mass audience is new territory for Castle. Particularly since she’s never had the slightest inclination to flirt with a mass audience.
“It feels great. It feels like a really wonderful opportunity,” says the Toronto native from her recently adopted home on the shores of Lake Erie in Port Stanley. “You know, I try to take the moments when they come like that because I almost identify more as a person who plays a really small, sparsely attended room and every now and then I have to stop and say, ‘Wait a sec, I’m playing the Danforth and it’s gonna be jam-packed and I’m sharing the bill with an incredible musician.’ We did it, and it feels really exciting.”
Naturally, with playing bigger rooms comes the burden of getting large crowds to shut up and pay attention.
Castle is kindred spirits with her recent tourmate Tamara Lindeman of the Weather Station — with whom she shares a fluttering, Joni Mitchell-esque high-register delivery and just released the terrific new tune “Midas Touch,” a warm softpsych kiss from the 1970s — in that she demands that her audience actually listen to grasp and to appreciate what’s going on. Castle’s Polaris-shortlisted 2014 killer, Pink City, was by no means her Chinese Democracy, but Angels of Death is fairly barren by comparison. Songs unfurl in indistinct patterns, doggedly embracing the virtue of quietude, and patience is essential to connect with them.
Music like that can easily get lost in the pop of beer cans and chit-chat from the back of the room, but Castle actually doesn’t mind the fight so much — owing, she says, to “my continued time as a supporting-act musician.
“I really do make my rounds on behalf of other people’s shows, and I rise to that challenge more than anything, it feels like. Give me a room that’s, like, so quiet you can hear a pin drop and you can hear my vi- brato start to amplify as I start to shake and get a bit nervous. But if you give me a challenge, then I’m almost more comfortable. I have a strong bravado. It comes in handy.”
Clearly, the approach works. Castle has ascended to where she currently sits after five cultishly admired albums — two as Castlemusic, three under the name Jennifer Castle (including 2011’s Castlemusic, just to mess with you) — and hundreds of small shows by winning over those chattering crowds, one new fan at a time.
“It feels like it’s been word-ofmouth and, because I’ve been doing it for some time and because I started before the internet was totally poppin’ in terms of social media and that being sometimes a quick and direct route to a big audience, I really feel like I’ve done it roomby-room and person-to-person. And I continue to do that.
“Lord knows, I play a spectrum of types of shows. I could be in a small, sparse room next week, and it’s totally normal for me to be there and meet people and play as well as I can and keep close to the source and it adds up. So it is a really nice moment to feel like people are starting to come around.
“I really got used to knowing most of the people in the room when I played (and now) I saw people lip-synching the words to songs when I was away last weekend — even songs off of early albums — and the whole band was, like, ‘Did you see those people mouthing along with the words?’ I couldn’t believe it.”
Maybe it’s not so strange that an album wholly preoccupied with death and its fallout — Angels is haunted by the spectres of Castle’s late father and her recently departed dog, Ribbon, in particular — should be the Castle record that finally starts connecting with a wider audience, since everyone can relate to that preoccupation, even if they don’t admit it. But it’s still kinda cool that an insular, challenging record referencing Al Purdy, W.B. Yeats and Ana Mendieta has been the one to take Jennifer Castle to the theatre level.
“I put a lot of writing work into it. There were some riddles I had to solve,” she says. “It’s fun to position yourself, as a writer, as such a profound underdog in trying to take on a subject like that. And it’s sort of like a movie: it’s kind of feel-good, like the ending of Thelma & Louise where they drive off the cliff and, well, you probably know what happens, but you leave with the fist-pump of ‘Yes! Who knows?’ And I feel it’s like that moment where you wrestle a really big subject and … you could slip between the cracks, maybe, just on a fictional level and find yourself a loophole in which you get to survive. And I think we all kind of embrace that underdog character and I think we all feel that when we wrestle our mortality, and I think that came out. And rock’n’-roll is a great place for an underdog.”