TORONTO -- Is there no other city for musicians than Paris?
Sure, it's a nice place to visit. But given how the city has become a breeding ground for many a musician as of late (Feist, Buck 65, Ben Harper and now Sarah Slean have all used the city as their muse), one has to wonder if the creative well in North America is simply running dry.
"The French know that culture is a food of sorts, a nourishment of sorts that is essential," she says, cupping her hands around a mug of coffee in the atrium of the CBC building in downtown Toronto.
"I think we're behind in North America, but we're going to learn it," she opines. "We just have to make it through the terrible chapters of reality television and manufactured pop artists first."
Working from song ideas she sketched after a seven-month sojourn in the City of Love in 2006, Slean's latest release, "The Baroness," is an intensely personal musical travelogue that eschews automatic frivolity ("To tell you the truth, I'm not really interested in Britney or Maroon 5," she chuckles) for elegiac piano-drenched reverie ("Get Home," "No Place At All") and perkily glum strings ("Sound of Water/ Change Your Mind").
Following 2006's live-studio hybrid, "Orphan Music," the singer wanted to experiment with a fuller sound. "I really had to reign in my desire to put everything but the kitchen sink all over these songs," she says.
After the European tour that supported 2004's "Day One," Slean returned to Toronto with a suitcase full of ideas. She had 23 songs to choose from, which was narrowed down to 12. "It's hard to whittle them down," she says. "But some songs really opened themselves to me."
The lyrical content tender and weighted with raw personal details ("Get Home" depicts a cheating heart), Slean says her first inclination was to bury her introspective balladry under a wash of horns and strings, before producer Jagori Tanna, the guitarist from I Mother Earth, got in between. "He would say to me, 'This vocal needs to be front and centre because of what you're saying.'
"He stressed that the tenderness of the songs and the vulnerability of the vocals, needed to be a focal point."
As a result, her personality drips into the lyrics, which flip between romantic laments ("I let the liar have me/ the forger and the cheat") and exploring the provocative visuals that are the basis for Slean's other artistic hobbies, poetry and art.
In fact, the album title refers to a character Slean has written about in short stories. "The urge to make art, and that flame you need to have inside you to be able to spray out and express yourself, that's where she comes from," Slean says.
But in the midst of finishing her degree in music and philosophy at the University of Toronto, Slean says it is her academic life that's informing her musical approach more and more.
"Everything that I've ever created that I thought was great or worthwhile was from that standpoint of being like, 'Woah…does anyone realize that right now there are insane, complex chemical transactions happening in their bloodstream?'
"There are billions of us and we're all intricate universes and that floors me.
"That mindset," and here she pauses as her lips curl into a knowing grin, "that's where art is born."
"The Baroness" is in stores now.
