MITCHELL BUILDS RECORD THROUGH ‘WINNOWING’,
“Winnowing” is a curious word and Guelph-based songwriter Jenny Mitchell learned about its meaning from a “kindred spirit of tiny songs,” Royal City musician/ producer Scott Merritt.
Mitchell had some old songs (dubbed “Bird City”) she has written alongside other musical projects. They needed a good home and she thought Merritt would be the perfect choice to help her out.
Merritt is an acclaimed producer who has worked with Fred Eaglesmith and Stephen Fearing.
“When I sent Scott those demos he wrote back in an email and the subject line was called “winnowing,” says Mitchell. “The email was about taking down this giant body of work into this specific small group of songs. I had to look up what “winnowing” meant because I did not know,” she adds.
“Then I found out that was the word they used for separating the wheat from the chaff. Before Scott and I started tracking and I just attached the process of “winnowing” to what we are doing and yeah, somewhere along the line I thought that really is what this body of songs is. It is not like the other parts are not important and it’s not like the others parts are gone. The Bird City songs will exist in their own right.
“Some of the songs are older but the music is quite new. Some of the songs are very new altogether and were chosen because the body of them fit together,” explains Mitchell. “I sent Scott 29 demos and I recorded them all on the same day in the same exact way so he could listen to all of them. He could pick what songs he thought would work best. It was really fascinating because they were a lot of the same songs I had picked as my favourites and totally different ones too,” she notes.
“They spanned an entire spectrum of age so Scott could not hear through the demos which ones were written a few days before and which ones were written the better part of a decade or more ago. That was a really interesting thing to me that these songs exist outside a sound of the times I guess. It is so like Scott Merritt to send an email because that can be so inspiring. That is why I decided to take wheat and make the album art with pieces of wheat,” adds Mitchell.
In addition to being a musician Mitchell is an also an artisan and innovator of The Golden Bus, an unusual performance venue which hosts concerts. Performers have included Julie Doiron, Ever Lovin’ Jug Band, Old Cabin, Jim Bryson and Shopkeeper featuring her partner Scott Haynes.
“Winnowing” was recorded over a threeyear period at Merritt’s Guelph studio.
Mitchell, a.k.a. Jenny Ominchord, also plays omnichord, an ’80s era electronic auto harp. For this “Bird City” project and “Winnowing” she plays mostly tenor guitar and banjo plus other instruments “to various extents and capabilities.”
She started playing music when she was 15. Her quirky bent on music and life comes from working at Guelph’s venerable (now closed) Family Thrift Store where she started folding bags for the ladies at the counter at age 11.
“My dad always had weird instruments kicking around the store and because of the peculiar sounds I always thought about becoming a musician and joining a band. That really happened out of spite. When I was in Grade 9 or 10 I used to go to lots of shows — young bands in Guelph who were a few years older than me. (Bar mitzvah Brother-to-be) Geordie Gordon (James Gordon’s son) and I knew each other from childhood and re-met through the thrift store so Geordie was in Grade 8 when I was Grade 10,” she says.
It was hard for Mitchell and Gordon to break into the music scene by meeting these older bands, and even the band’s friends.
So Mitchell thought, why not start a band of her own? That opportunity came through a music contest at her school. After a successful audition, Mitchell’s band (The Barmitzvah Brothers) had one week to come up with a set list.
“It was April 4, 2000,” says Mitchell. “I remember the date, and yeah, we ended being a band for almost a decade.”
Mitchell says working at the thrift store also gave her a multi-generational viewpoint on life, and broad spectrum of friends of different ages. It is also one of the reasons she has stayed in Guelph.
“You start making up stories about people’s lives and what their houses must look like based on the things they go with. I have always been sort of a people collector or a story collector,” she notes.
Her thrift shop years have often informed her lyrics often similar to the quirky style of an early Jane Siberry.
Under Merritt’s unusual music instrumentation meshed skilful and spare production, “Winnowing” highlights include (“Hours”) about time alone in one’s thoughts, uptempo tune “Middle of the Night” featuring Merritt on dual vocals, nostalgic sentiment “Salvage Diver” and banjo-nuanced opener “Bird City.”
Mitchell loves birds from coo of the morning dove to the understated beauty of female cardinals.
“Bird City” the song is about the fact that I seem to have an uncanny habit of spotting birds of prey when I am driving in my vehicle,” says Mitchell. “I seem to have a knack for looking out the window and spotting one. It is neat because I recently reconnected with a friend of mine through high school who I found out is Indigenous. She did not tell me that when she was in high school,” she recalls. “I was telling her about “Bird City” and that I kept seeing birds of prey. She told me that is their teachings — birds of prey show up to tell you that you are in the right place. So if you see a bird of prey that is where you are supposed to be. It could be connected to hunting or symbolisms,” she notes. “I think it was wild that I randomly shared that with them and that they have that story in their culture.”