Great Lake Swimmers seek their sound under the subway
Over the last decade and four records of music, Great Lake Swimmers have built a reputation for delivering moody Canadiana from the unlikeliest of places: A castle. A church. The pockmarked concrete shell of an abandoned grain silo.
Given that journey, the title of the latest, New Wild Everywhere (out Tuesday), might amount to a sly in-joke — Great Lake Swimmers storming a state-of-the-art recording studio. What’s so New, Wild and Everywhere about that?
“It’s a location in its own way, too,” frontman/songwriter Tony Dekker insists. “Just kind of a different approach.”
Fans would know, though, that New Wild Everywhere just had to contain one exploration into the sonic unknown — another “environmental recording,” as Dekker puts it. In this case it’s Toronto’s Lower Bay Street subway station, long the haunt of film crews, but never a five-piece of folkies lugging their gear down four flights at midnight, setting up and waiting for the trains above to stop running so they could get a usable take, then marching laden back up the stairs to emerge at street level at dawn.
It could be dismissed as a gimmick to talk about in media interviews (“Yeah, totally!” Dekker says, a touch too enthusiastically). But the Swimmers have delivered under these conditions before. No one should be surprised that, in a beleaguered subway system where PA announcements seem to arrive gargling and barely intelligible from the bottom of a deep well, the track in question, “The Great Exhale,” works out just fine.
The subway has long been one of Dekker’s chief muses, but don’t go expecting a reprise. “I’m really glad we didn’t decide to do the whole record that way. It would’ve been an absolute nightmare.”
“As it is, there was a kind of mythological aspect to it too. This forgotten place, this ghost station underneath the working station . . . and that’s my little black train song. It’s coming for everybody, it’s a oneway ticket kind of thing. To be in this ghost station — in a sense, there was a certain congruity there.”
Three or four other songs recorded underground will show up as bonus tracks for the faithful, but “The Great Exhale” fits nicely on the impressive new album. The band’s fifth collection seems destined to repeat and build on the success of Lost Channels, their Polaris Prize-shortlisted, Juno-nominated 2009 release, now that they’ve arrived as a true collective.
“I’d always kind of envisioned Great Lake Swimmers as a vehicle for my songwriting,” said Dekker. “(But) I feel pretty confident this is the lineup now. I feel like we’ve found people who will settle into this and that are dedicated to the project and the songs. It really has come a long way, for sure, even from a couple records ago.”
The new face, at least from a recording perspective, is Miranda Mulholland, who joined on the Lost Channels tour and fits in seamlessly whether singin’ or fiddlin’ — even spectacularly on the first track: the most soulful song the band hasdone, “Think That You Might Be Wrong.” Upright bassist Bret Higgins’ string arrangements add a rich layer to that one, as well as to another standout, “Quiet Your Mind.”
“She’s such an awesome fiddle player and singer, and she immediately added so much to the band,” said Dekker. “Bret’s a composer and those arrangements were all his doing. It’s mind-blowing to see these songs transformed and filled out.”
Dekker’s longest-serving bandmate, banjo/guitar ace Erik Arne- sen, drummer Greg Millson and Swimmers producer Andy Magoffin round out a collective that has never sounded more assured — it’s the same mellow and melodic vintage, but a more mature blend that’s a couple degrees removed from their strummy roots.
“I still like to think we made a pretty organic record,” Dekker said. “I don’t think it’s overproduced or too slick, or purposefully commercial or anything like that. I think we made a kind of down to earth, warm-sounding folk rock record and Andy maybe said it best — we sound like us no matter where we are.”
It all rests, as ever, on Dekker’s finely crafted song work that con- tinues his thematic tracing of the tensions between worlds natural, rural and urban. A self-described kid from the country who grew up on a farm in tiny Wainfleet, Ont., there’s plenty of his adopted hometown of Toronto in here. It’s present covertly on the title track, where the “Big Smoke” is presented tellingly as a construct not of skyscrapers and concrete but of rocks and clay and water, and more up front on “Parkdale Blues.” Dekker’s lens widens with “Ballad of a Fisherman’s Wife,” a lament to the human cost of the BP oil spill and beyond (“This is a time bomb/ And it could happen anywhere”). But perhaps the biggest departure comes in “Fields of Progeny/les Champs De Progeniture,” wherein Dekker channels Hank Williams as he explores, in each official language, the tradition the Swimmers are following. One version leans to folk, the other to country, but this ain’t no two solitudes. “We recorded it in English first as ‘Fields of Progeny,’ and part of me thinks we’re in Canada, we’re a bilingual country — it was important to me to do a song in French,” said Dekker. “But really from the beginning I envisioned that song in French too. I heard it in French.” New, wild, everywhere — perhaps it is that after all. Great Lakes Swimmers will play the Music Hall on June 2.
“Part of me thinks we’re in Canada, we’re a bilingual country — it was important to me to do a song in French.” TONY DEKKER OF GREAT LAKE SWIMMERS, ON MAKING TWO VERSIONS OF “FIELDS OF PROGENY” ON THE NEW ALBUM