Sarah Slean confides that several of the songs on her most recent album, The Baroness, document the singer-songwriter's 2006 spell as a resident of the City of Lights. A period of the artist's life that, she adds, was a less than happy one.
"I became really disillusioned with trying to make music as a career," Slean, now comfortably home in Toronto, relates. "I kind of came to a point where I thought, 'I should just do what amuses my soul. I shouldn't be doing this for a living -- it's madness.'"
"It was," she quietly adds, "a really dark year."
It's a darkness echoed in the grand songs of The Baroness, to the wryly cynical Notes From the Underground from the despondent No Place at All. Yet, through it all (as suggested by the "Prologue" and "Epilogue" penned for the CD's booklet), Slean prefers to call herself an optimist.
"That is my objective, artistically," she insists. "To take the moments when you're doubting and despairing and turn them into revitalized hope. If your hope is being questioned and weakening, you have to turn that around and make it 10 times what it was before.
"Sometimes it feels like you're doing that from nothing. But that's what art is: Making something out of nothing. That's why it's so powerful."
And that, needless to add, is what keeps this sensitive artist going, expressing herself not only through music but also through poetry. All while striving to complete her philosophy studies at the University of Toronto -- a decision the veteran touring performer made amid the fallout of her Paris experience.
"I am going to finish my degree," Slean vows. "I need to finish what I've started. It's good, because it takes you out of the microcosm of the music industry and into the world of vast realms of knowledge that have nothing to do with you."
Well, the self-analysis that runs through The Baroness (e.g., "Hopeful hearts are moving targets/I don't know how I survive") suggests Slean has found a use for that knowledge.
"I don't know how you could study philosophy and not become deeply fascinated by your mind -- by the human condition," she says. "That's why I love philosophy, and that's why I make music. I have that curiosity and that wonder and awe at our entire predicament. To me, it's endlessly fascinating."
But if The Baroness leaves us with our heroine Slean still feeling incomplete -- "Looking for someone/ Who's looking for me" -- it is, dare we voyeurs suggest, the sort of vulnerability that makes for great art. Slean claims to be in a better place now, thanks in no small part to the cathartic release of her disillusionment through a dozen well-crafted new songs.
The Baroness is, alas, not her first attempt to chronicle a "really dark year." Her 2004 release Day One, for instance, followed a retreat from the world that involved living in a cabin near Ottawa and, again, pondering the worth of making music as a career.
"That was in 2003," Slean reflects. "And that was a really severe disillusionment. I didn't think I could participate in society as a whole and I was contemplating living in a cabin in the woods forever. I settled for four months."
Paris, by contrast, lasted seven months. And while Slean is reluctant to accept the notion one must suffer for her art, she nonetheless values each experience, however disillusioning.
"I think that's the major revelation of this record for me," she suggests. "There's no little safe island that you're going to arrive on. You're not going to find a place where there won't be struggle.
"Struggle is it. Struggle is what makes you stronger. Struggle is what you're here for. You're hammering away at the rock because you're chiselling your masterpiece.
"I kind of welcome it now."
