TRIGGS TURNS UP HER VOLUME
Singer-songwriter dabbles with rock on new album featuring plenty of standout tracks
On Emily Triggs's deceptively breezy single Summer in Nevada, the Calgary-based singer-songwriter explores the U.S. government's nuclear bomb testing in Nevada in the 1950s and the lingering health effects it had on the army personnel who ran toward the blast and its radiation as part of the tests.
It now seems downright surreal, as does the fact these blasts were once considered tourist attractions.
Fascinating stuff, but not exactly traditional fodder for endearingly catchy guitar-pop songs.
“I had travelled to Las Vegas and heard about nuclear tourism when I was down there,” says Triggs. “In the '50s and '60s, they would set off these nuclear bombs. People would travel there, they would advertise it as a nuclear blast happening and people would travel and stay up in their hotel rooms drinking cocktails all night and wait for the blast to go off at 5 or 6 in the morning. They would ooh and aah as the plume would go up.
“At the same time, the army was working the nuclear blast. So they would be running towards the blast and working all around it, not knowing the exposure that is occurring. So the dichotomy of that was really fascinating to me.”
It's one of many standout tracks on Triggs's third solo album, The Great Escape, which includes songs that examine the good, the bad and the weird of North American culture. That includes the nostalgia-fuelled opening track, London 1969, which Triggs co-wrote with Lovebullies vocalist Caroline Connolly, about watching the moon landing as a child. There are celebratory odes such as My Son; Rough in the Ring is a rollicking call for resilience in tough times; Sister Summer is a powerful study of mortality; Ask the Birds is a delicate, poetic snapshot.
The Great Escape should only further Triggs's reputation as one of the city's best songsmiths, which was made evident in her first two solo records — 2014's When Guinevere Went Under and 2019's Middletown — and her time spent with the traditional folk outfit Magnolia Buckskin.
While The Great Escape is a multi-layered and exhilarating trip of an album, it all comes down to the songs. Triggs had amassed quite a stockpile since releasing Middletown. Neko Case collaborator and Calgary expat Paul Rigby had played guitar on that record and Triggs thought he would be the perfect sounding board for her writing, not to mention being able to capture the harder-edged, guitar-based sounds she was looking for on The Great Escape.
Before heading into the studio, Triggs and Rigby met at an Airbnb in his now hometown of Vancouver with acoustic guitars to whittle down the more than 60 songs Triggs had written. Some were already fully formed, others were fragments.
“We were sitting in the Airbnb for four or five days just working out the songs,” she says. “What do we want to hear? What chords do we want changed in the song? One of my favourite things to do is talk about the song. Does it make sense? Is it a good song? Where do we want it to go? What drive would it have? We would just record it on an iphone.”
Eventually, the two recorded in several Vancouver locales — including Afterlife Studios, which is the former home of the legendary Mushroom Studios — with Rigby bringing in some top players from the city, including multi-instrumentalist Dave Carswell from Destroyer, Frazey Ford bassist Darren Parris and Colin James drummer Geoff Hicks. Carswell and City and Colour's Erik Nielsen were enlisted as engineers. While Triggs was certainly aware of Rigby's impressive credits — he co-wrote and arranged several tracks on Neko Case's most recent albums, including 2018's Hell- On, 2013's The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You and 2009's Middle Cyclone, and has performed with T-bone Burnett, Garth Hudson and Los Lobos, among others — she was convinced Rigby was the right producer after working with him in Calgary on her Lorrie Matheson-produced sophomore album.
“We were working on the songs for Middletown and there was a rock thread that we could feel in a couple of the songs, Middletown and Trouble, and it was a string I wanted to follow,” she says. “So when I was thinking about who I wanted to work with, he came to mind. I was writing songs that had a little bit more `big' to them, a little bit more of a rock feel. Because Rigby and I connected so well, I really felt heard by him. I just felt like he was the right person to do it.”
Triggs will be heading east for a Canadian tour later in the year and has tentatively planned a hometown record release show for late fall. While not all the songs on The Great Escape are rockers, it's easy to imagine numbers such as Summer in Nevada, the Pretenders-esque I Know and the spirited Rough in the Ring generating heat on stage.
The album's title comes from the 13th and final track on the album, Water Tower, an aching, wistful ballad Triggs co-wrote with Love-bullies guitarist Chantal Vitalis.
“Some people would ask me `Are you going to do your artwork before?' and `What's the name of the album?' I have no idea, you let the songs tell you what the album is going to be,” she says. “I'm not very contrived in how I do an album, I wait to follow it.
“In the end, I was looking through (the songs) and saying what is this and trying to evaluate what we created. The themes in the songs were that people were leaving a place or leaving a mindset. I could see that theme of leaving on the album. I called the album The Great Escape … and it just seemed fitting. That was the theme I saw. There is a foundation or an underbelly of home and family in a warm way.”