Hi all,

Yup, I've partially come onboard Web 2.0 -- still not on Facebook, out of stubbornness. It's funny to remember how nerdy my compatriots and I were considered for using an online BBS in '95, and perhaps some of my reluctance to ride atop this particular bandwagon arose out of the need to avoid my hyper-loquacious 13-year-old self, who obsessively fine-tuned her online 'resume,' and sent her friends 10-page e-mails about nothing in particular, all for the thrill of the instant message. 

Nice interview with Caroline Klibanoff of Paste magazine:

Nice review here:

http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:hbfexzykldde

Being compared to Joni Mitchell is something I certainly will never mind.

Hi all,

I'd like to direct your attention to another blog of mine, that Exclaim! is graciously hosting for the month of February. It chronicles my Yukon travels, and is located here:

laurabarrett.exclaim.ca

Please enjoy the words and images!

laurabee
xo

In case it expires:

This thumb plucker is one sexy nerd
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN

January 28, 2009 at 4:59 PM EST

Simple instruments can be quite complicated when you get to know them. Laura Barrett's kalimbas are just wooden boxes with narrow metal keys flaring from their surfaces, but no two of them play exactly the same scale. Some might call that a flaw, but for Barrett, it's a virtue. She's especially fond of the ones whose keys she has adjusted to produce uniquely raw and “gnarly” sounds, in wonky scales you won't find on a piano.

“On this one, the lowest tone is so low, you can't hear the fundamental tone, just the overtones,” she said, thumbing a key to release a faint and complex tangle of sound. “I love that, it's like a gong.”

Barrett is a Toronto musician whose songs are as simple, and as complicated, as the instrument she has brought to new pop prominence. They have the open-handed charm of old-time Broadway melodies and the playful inscrutability of a Dada collage – they're nerdy, whimsical, erudite and romantic. just like the rather elfin woman who makes them. Barrett recently produced an album's worth, entitled Victory Garden, and it's a record unlike any other.

She sings in a voice like that of an underage big-band singer, a pure opaque soprano that blooms on the microphone like tropical flowers. Her most characteristic accompaniments are the pouncing, flooding sounds of her piano, or the pungent tinkling of her kalimbas, though Victory Garden features a bouquet of strings, reeds, vibraphone and even a theremin.

“I grew up surrounded by singers and dancers,” one of whom was her mother, Barrett says. “My father ran a dinner theatre, His Majesty's Feast, on Lake Shore Boulevard. It doesn't exist any more, but it was around for 18 years. They would pipe in medieval music as you were coming in and being seated, but all the songs were pilfered from stage musicals of the time.”

Steeped in the family business of putting over a song, she studied piano and clarinet, and throughout high school wrote her own songs, including one (she won't say which) that eventually found a place on Victory Garden. She still has masses of audio tape from the song-storming sessions of her teenage years.

“My songs generally were very melodramatic, like forties Broadway,” she said of those early efforts. “I would just sit there and improvise and write lyrics. I would never perform them in front of anybody but my mother. She has always encouraged me to express myself. All my musical tastes, from zero to age 17, were basically hers.”

Barrett went to university to study physics and math, with no thought of becoming a performer. She also took linguistics classes (she and a friend had made up their own language in Grade 4), driven in part by the romantic notion that as we take on new languages, we become different people.

“I think if I had taken theoretical math I would be on a totally different path now,” she says. “I would be doing grad studies in math.”

But by mistake she got into a tediously practical part of the discipline, interrupted her studies after one degree, and began tutoring and doing educational presentations of a menagerie of reptiles she carried from one school to another. She kept writing songs, not for herself but for some as-yet-unidentified performers whose skills would be far beyond hers.

Everything changed when she bought a kalimba almost by accident on eBay, while shopping for cheap recording gear. She learned to play it and worked up a kalimba cover of Weird Al Yankovic's parody of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, for an omnibus show at a Toronto club. Her performance, and the story behind it, became a local legend. Her original song Robot Ponies, about a little girl's robotic toys under the Christmas tree, got wide traffic on the Internet. Last year, she signed with Paper Bag Records, a leading Toronto indie label, and in December was named Canada's sexiest indie musician in a CBC Radio 3 poll.

She still believes in the magical, talismanic power of words, and it shows in her songwriting. You get the feeling that the words have been chosen for everything that they are: the sound, the sense and the way they feel in the mouth, as well as what they contribute to her oblique kind of storytelling.

“I think [the songs on Victory Garden] are more narrative-based than not,” she says, “but I'm only giving some events along the way, and some objects and feelings, and not sticking with the story throughout. Chidiya is definitely about memory and empty-nest syndrome, a parent mourning the loss of memories. She's just wishing that something would come back to her, even if it were only a fight about something she can't really remember.

“ Spoiler Alert is about some celebrity who is being badgered relentlessly, and about her life experience. It's basically Britney Spears. And Bluebird is about global paranoia and being told what to be afraid of, and what labels to apply to people.”

There are many phrases on the record that seem elegantly poised on the brink of some specific meaning, and that just need the weight of a listener's attention to tip them over. Some are strangely topical, such as: “Who cares if your currency's low? I still have to use your etiquette” – sung to a striding, rather sinister piano riff, that eventually melts into a wash of tremolo, and then into a serene invocation of some water-fairy coronation with synchronized swimmers: “touching down on the ocean, we pour crowns, we wave fast …”

Barrett's musical life is a sociable one, shared with a fun-loving community of 15 to 20 people who play in each other's bands, rehearse in the same basement studio and try to win at each other's board games. Barrett plays in the Hidden Cameras and Henri Fabergé and the Adorables, and is particularly keen on a game called Illuminati: the Game of Conspiracy.

“You develop power structures, and try to destroy other people's power structures,” she says, laughing her free and buoyant laugh. If you fail, you just retune to a scale that only you can play, and start again.

Laura Barrett plays the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto Jan. 28 (with Josh Reichmann and Valery Gore), the KIAC Ballroom in Dawson City, Yukon, on Feb. 6 and at Toronto's Music Gallery on March 11 (with Charles Spearin).

Hi everyone!

I write this to you from Dawson City, where I'm the 2009 DCMF Songwriter-in-Residence... and in all the excitement of getting my things ready for the month-long stay, I neglected to link to this article http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090128.wbarrett0129/BNStory/Entertainment/home.

Please note that the absurd headline was not devised by the writer of the article, who crafted a detailed and flattering portrait I hardly deserve. And dearest G&M commenters, who assume that prescription glasses are in fact worn as fashion accessories: Where were you when I was in grade three? I could have used your reassurance that, eventually, my declining eyesight would paradoxically make for good visuals. :)

As for the vistas of life at hand:
Tonight I began my creative journey in our nation's northern reaches, where the only sounds are just liminal, except when the pipes in this house get restless. The sky is gloriously free of the downtown Toronto light pollution I grew up with, while indoors my SADelite is all set up for tomorrow's pre-dawn wakeup. Sometime after sunrise, I'll be informally introduced to my new neighbourhood by the wonderful Amy-Lynn Karchut, who's co-ordinating this year's Dawson City Music Festival. The two of us drove up the icy curves of HWY-2 from Whitehorse this morning and our trip was that great mix of ruggedly beautiful scenery and good conversation you have in new surroundings with a new friend.

I hope everyone's having a focused and energetic week, and though I miss you, Southern Canada, I'll be home before I know it, so I've got to make the most of my time up here. Stay tuned for updates of my productivity, and feel free to post your own!

Remember: 2009 = super-fine,

laurabee
xo

Well, hello, MySpace onlookers and fellow artists...

I seem to have picked up a rather silly award (watch the CBC Bucky awards here on R3TV) recognizing the combination of a healthy attitude and interesting personality, that I like to think I project through the top 3mm of epidermis and direct eye contact. I don't always feel particularly sexy, but I'm sure my Love appreciates being able to say that of his betrothed, with some numbers backing him up. Score one for him!

For the record: my no-makeup policy results in my face looking younger than it actually is, meaning I'll be carded at the liquor store for at least another ten years. But I'm no spring chicken; even my university degree is toddler age by now! So, despite my being quite long in the tooth, when a group of people on the Internet voted on various intangible concepts, they still deigned to include me on their list of superlatives. I am both honoured and amused.

Happy holidays and hibernations, and see you all next year!

laurabee
xo

CBC has uploaded the Radio 3 session we recorded back in July, and it sounds lovely, if I do say so myself!

Check it out here: http://radio3.cbc.ca/concerts/Laura-Barrett-2008-07-15

Hello friends!

I've been a little delayed in making this update, because the news honestly caught me off-guard. I got a call last week from CBC 3's Grant Lawrence, informing me I've been nominated for two Bucky awards. The first one is for most unconventional instrument, where I face competition from the ukulele, accordian, bagpipes, and lawnmower pull-starter! The combo suggests future collaboration possibilities, for sure.

The other nomination is for ... um... Sexiest Canadian Musician!?!?! No comment, except to say that I'm pleasantly flabbergasted by this Revenge of the Nerds. I do, however, feel that Dan Werb was robbed! I hereby elect him Sexiest Musician Ever, and I'm starting work on a naughty trophy. Message me with any suggestions.

Anyway, please vote on the CBC 3 page for your favourites in many, many categories: 2008 Bucky Award voting page. You can vote once a day until the 28th of November. Have fun!

laurabee
xo