Critics, fans love Bulat’s fresh sound
By the time she finally takes the stage Thursday night for her first folk fest performance, Basia Bulat will already have put in almost a full week’s work for organizers. She’s one of the artists they approached to participate in the boot camp aspect of the festival, where known musicians offer advice and guidance to aspiring acts.
Bulat, specifically, was enlisted to teach the art of songwriting to those who want to learn from one of the country’s best. And while she was planning on having some fun with it — putting her students through an actual boot camp before getting down to the act of creating music — she’s also looking at it as a serious thing to be charged with. So much so that she balks when asked if she can do us all a favour and stamp out some of the dreams of the, shall we say, slower students before any more bad music is unleashed on the public. Bulat laughs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t really want to believe that anybody who comes out of my workshop will bad. They’re all going to be great.”
Hard not to disagree. If they pick up even a minimal amount of her talent for penning and crafting a song, then the world will be a better place.
The 30-year-old Ontario native has, in a relatively short amount of time, proven herself to be one of this country’s finest and freshest acts, releasing a trio of albums in six years that have had critics and audiences agog.
Her latest record, last year’s deeply personal Tall Tall Shadow, has taken things to the next level — a melodic chamber-folk work of haunting beauty that coaxes a shiver from the first second and builds goosebump on top of goosebump until you’re entirely consumed.
Not surprisingly, it’s also taken the Bulat love to greater heights, earning praise from all quarters and Bulat, rightfully, her second spot on the Polaris Prize shortlist.
Although she appreciates the accolades, this record wasn’t made with any of that in mind. Like much great art, it was made entirely for her, because she had to.
“When I was making this record I had a clear mandate to myself, because of where the songs were coming from,” says Bulat of the death that led her to Tall Tall Shadow.
“It was really coming from a place of missing somebody that I loved very much ... I made a promise to myself when I was making it that it didn’t matter how it was received or whether it was going to be positive or negative critical reception ...
“I was trying hard to make sure that how other people felt about it didn’t change how I felt about it or my relationship to the songs.”
Perhaps because of the subject matter and the tone of the album, as a whole, it’s drawn perceptive comparisons to Beck’s masterpiece breakup record Sea Change. It’s also the closest thing Bulat thinks she’s made to a complete work, a beginning-to-end album, despite the fact that being a child of the mixtape and download generation she leans toward treating each song as its own entity.
Some of that credit might also go the room most of the album was recorded in, an old Legion dance hall in Toronto with powder blue walls, high ceilings and an “early portrait of the Queen.”
“It’s a room that has a lot of character so I wonder how much that influenced it,” she says. “Even though the arrangements of the songs are pretty different, maybe the feeling was also kind of influenced a little bit by the room too and just by the subject matter we were taking the direction from the words.”
And while those words may have deep, profound meaning to her and to the soul whose loss she suffered, she’s finding that audiences are interpreting and connecting to them in their own personal ways which they’ve shared with her after shows. Despite her earlier acknowledgment that Tall Tall Shadow was made with only her expression in mind, she admits to a certain sense of gratification that others are bringing their own experiences to the material, stating that it lets her appreciate that “there’s more in those songs than even I know.”
“There’s this (quote) that I love from Margaret Atwood saying she doesn’t want to talk too much about what her books are about because there’s more in them than even she knows and she doesn’t want to close off doors to people.”
Bulat laughs. “Or some great quote that I’m terribly misquoting. But when I read an interview with her and she was saying that, I thought, ‘Wow, it’s true because I’ve experienced that myself now.’
“There’s things that people see in them and feel in them that even I didn’t know were there. Which is the magic about making anything and putting it out in the world.”