Basia Bulat to help kick off Montréal en lumière fest
Basia Bulat mixes moods on Good Advice
“In a weird way, the universe has always been pulling me to Montreal,” Basia Bulat said last month, hanging out at the Plateau headquarters of her label, Secret City. And yet when the Toronto native fully gave herself over to the universe and moved to the city where she had recorded her first three albums, she took her songs on a road trip.
“It’s so strange — I moved here and then I didn’t make a record here! But I was going through so many changes, and I felt really vulnerable. I was going through sadness, fear — and moving’s really big. A very important relationship in my life had ended, and I think it was good for me to get away. Sometimes you just want to feel like you have had a little vacation.”
Recorded in Louisville, Ky., with My Morning Jacket’s free-spirited frontman Jim James producing, Bulat’s just-released Good Advice feels less like a vacation and more like a new start. After three albums that brought her luminous quietude to progressively complex and darker places, this sounds like a party. A party where everyone is crying in the corner, but still.
“We took a lot of acoustic, slower tunes and made them all pretty danceable,” Bulat said. “It’s definitely the brightest and most major-key thing I’ve ever done.” But there’s a happy sadness to her steely hallelujahs and interstellar synths, from the buoyant La La Lie, whose barbed admonitions are tempered by a vintage girl-group soundtrack, to the bittersweet open future of Someday Soon. While her clarion vocals have never sounded more confident, she wanted the title track to share its name with the album “because there’s no real advice on the record. It’s just a lot of questions.”
She trusted James to help her find the answers, giving herself over to the wonder of her friend’s “magical unicorn quality,” and staying open to the unexpressed possibilities in her songs. “We talked about arrangements quite a bit,” she said, “but he also was very conscious of wanting it to sound like me, and very much wanted to make the focus on my voice and the lyrics.”
Those keyboards, though. In their way, Good Advice’s synths are more radical than the array of stringed instruments that coloured Bulat’s previous work. At least, to anyone who wasn’t at her childhood piano lessons.
“It was fun playing a ton of keyboards and realizing, ‘Yeah, that’s my first instrument,’” she said. “And I’ve always collected synths and keyboards and organs privately — I’ve just never really exposed them publicly. All the people who think the autoharp’s weird, I don’t think they want to see how much stuff I have collected in my mom’s basement and at my own house.”
Bulat downplays the idiosyncrasies of some of the instruments that soundtracked her rise to international stages, where she has supported the likes of Nick Cave, Sufjan Stevens and Daniel Lanois, although she allows that her friends’ eyes sometimes go wide.
“For me, I’m just playing music. And they’d go, ‘You’re a freak! You just walked on stage playing a piece of wood with a hammer.’”
That would be her 100-year-old pianoette. “I just think it’s cool and it sounds good. If it sounds good, it doesn’t matter what it looks like or how weird it is.”
An open-minded attitude in line with her open-minded adoptive city. “Every time I came to Montreal, something would happen,” said Bulat, who spent a summer in immersion at Université de
Montréal a decade back, practising her French while working at Movieland. “I would come back for four months at a time, and I met musicians here through random channels. The way things always happen.”
She remembers scouring the old Montreal Shows message board — as notable for its comprehensiveness as for its vitriol — when she lived in London, Ont. “Just going to a lot of shows here, I became friends with some bands. One of them — the Adam Brown; they’re an awesome rock band — was recording with Howard (Bilerman).”
Bulat sang backup for them at Hotel2Tango, the scene hub run by Bilerman and members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. “It felt like a very chill spot, but like you open up a door and there’s a whole other world. Like the TARDIS.”
She asked Bilerman to document songs she had written while in school in London. “I just thought, ‘I know this isn’t going to last forever, and I want to have some kind of memory of this.’ He was like, ‘I can totally do that for you!’ Then all of a sudden I’ve put out four records.”
That’s the short version. The long version includes kinships with members of Arcade Fire, leading to Bulat playing bass alongside Tim Kingsbury and Jeremy Gara at Bar Le Ritz PDB last summer for the live debut of Kingsbury’s Sam Patch project. It includes a tour that kicks off Thursday at Club Soda, on the opening night of the multidisciplinary Montréal en lumière festival, and that might feature Bulat finding her inner Rick Wakeman. (“When you play on a synth, it can get real prog.”) And it includes the continuing embrace of the unknown.
“The next thing is always a surprise. As much as I might say, ‘I want to make this kind of album,’ you can’t control it. You want to think the artist has all this power and is omnipotent in their work, and they’re just not. Which is great.”