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Flamboyant singer-songwriter Sarah Slean was so overcome by the new pressures as a major label recording artist, she retreated to a hideaway in the woods to write her new album, Day One.
"I lived there out of desperation and necessity because I was losing my mind. Something major died inside of me and I didn't want to be Sarah Slean for five minutes," she says. "I was very unwell in the heart. I wanted to figure out who I really was as opposed to thinking I could find it in the way I reflected back in the faces of other people. I was defining myself in the way others thought about me. I had all these labels I stuck on myself and I couldn't breathe, so I took them off one by one."
In July 2003 Slean, 27, sublet her Toronto apartment, gave away most of her possessions, loaded her piano on a truck and moved to a cabin near Almonte, Ont., about 50 kilometres west of Ottawa. She spent four months living on her own, reading books, listening to records and writing music on the piano and a computer with an orchestration program. The lyrics she wrote during her self-imposed isolation reflect her philosophy on self-healing and a utopian vision of the world. Even Slean's artwork for the album -- angels bleeding from stumps of severed wings as they ascend to a mythical city of light -- is a metaphor for her journey out of depression she was feeling.
"I was going down to the basement of myself, to the centre where it's dark and creepy. I wanted to lie down in the hole, the blackness and nailbiting to suffer through it so I could learn something -- so I could crawl back out of the hole and gain wings."
Slean emerged from the cabin with the new album -- her fourth disc and second for Warner Music -- and a renewed confidence about who she was and her place in the world.
"I called it Day One because I feel like I crawled out of the hole, I turned it all off, and I survived," she says. "I would say I was growing muscles in the cabin. That was the goal: to get strong. I definitely have bigger muscles and a clearer mind."
Slean flexes her muscles with her band at the West End Cultural Centre on Saturday. Admission is $18.