At home in country
Canadian Brulee finds her sound via detour to Australia
By age 21, singer-songwriter Melanie Brulee had had enough of the cold Canadian winters. Looking for a change, as big a change as she could get, the native of Cornwall, Ontario, packed up and moved to Australia. “I thought, ‘What’s the polar opposite of Canadian, somewhere I won’t have to see snow?’ ” Brulee said ahead of her Tuesday show at Atwood’s. Brulee fell in love and, more importantly, learned how to play guitar. “I picked up a guitar and didn’t realize what was happening,” she said. “I thought it was three months of hanging out on the beach, strumming and smoking joints, but it was really three months of guitar lessons. I started learning different styles, busking on the street, getting over that crazy anxiety that comes when you first get up on stage.” Listening to Brulee’s new album, “Fires, Floods & Things We Leave Behind,” you’d never guess she grew up in Canada, cut her artistic teeth in Australia and recorded a French album (“Debridee” in 2015). The lonesome ballads and rootin’-tootin’ barnburners sound like something cooked up by a country queen born in Jackson, Miss., raised in Austin and polished in Nashville. The only things foreign about the music are the tremolo guitar and the highplains-drifter whistling straight out of a spaghetti Western. “Kevin (Neal), my righthand man (and guitarist), and I found this Western sound that we really liked for the record,” she said. “I told him I wanted to make it feel like a proper film soundtrack, so the first song (‘I Will’) comes back at the end as an instrumental like the credits were rolling.” For Brulee, the album represents a return to her roots. Now based in Toronto, Brulee considers herself a folk singer, and these songs cer- tainly have a folk vibe if you believe the genre wide enough to capture Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams, Joan Baez and Jason Isbell. “My grandmother had a trailer on the St. Lawrence River, and all I heard there growing up was country music,” Brulee said. “I didn’t want to listen to that stuff. I was into dark stuff, Tori Amos and stuff like that. I think I denied for a long time that I played country music. “Then, when I first moved to Toronto, I played with a band where I basically pretended I was Patsy Cline’s granddaughter,” she added. “It made it easier to pretend. But after a while I realized I really loved classic country.” While she had found her sound, she needed songs. But after “Debridee,” Brulee struggled with writer’s block. She found a cure — and some confirmation her new country aesthetic was a fitting choice — in a 10-day road trip down the historic Route 66. “It was April and still snowing in Toronto and I had just told myself I was going to have a big writing year,” she said. “It was the perfect time for a road trip from Nashville to Vegas. Along the way, I became fascinated with ghost towns in Texas. By day one, I was writing without a guitar in my hand. The whole album began there, with that trip and those towns.”