“We didn’t go into the studio with a vision or plan, which is the way we always approach things.”
Sam Parton is talking about recording “Hello Love,” the recent album from her band, The Be Good Tanyas. The Vancouver, British Columbia, alt-country trio has always played things on the run and off the cuff, and it’s worked well for the 8-year-old all-female group. When Parton, Frazey Ford and Trish Klein first started playing together – with singer-songwriter Jolie Holland in the mix in the early days before she went solo – there was no intent to make an album.
“We were just recording songs because we wanted to,” Parton said.
Now the Tanyas have built a loyal fan base – in the United Kingdom, to boot – by writing and playing Americana music with a focus on addictively folksy harmonies and a deep respect for traditional roots music.
But the group recently learned that the fast and loose life isn’t always an ideal way of creating music. “Hello Love,” the Tanyas’ third record in five years, is all over the map. Stylistically it’s shot through with the Tanyas’ smart and sunwashed country. It mixes their own songwriting collaboration “Ootischenia,” the lush and traditional “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today,” with covers of Neil Young, Mississippi John Hurt and even Prince.
Don’t misinterpret. This record’s a great listen – a fresh breath into acoustic roots music, including an unnerving take on Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” But as Parton notes, “Hello Love” sounds as if the band entered the studio without a plan.
“I think a producer would have been really helpful, actually,” Parton said recently. “We probably all feel that that might be a good choice. What we ended up having was three people trying to produce an album, and we didn’t have an objective fourth party that was able to oversee the individual visions that we all had and find the common ground, and that’s really important.”
It’s a new notion for the Tanyas, who never really have worked with a traditional producer. With 2001’s “Blue Horse,” they had a co-producer. There was a “really vocal engineer” on 2003’s “Chinatown,” Parton said; that brought some perspective when they were too close to the songs.
“Hello Love” is a beautiful and reverent record, but it sounds more like a mix tape than a full-length album – not that such randomness takes away from the music. When the fiddle and banjo aren’t dueling, the acoustic guitar and piano lead the charge. The influences are obvious – especially given that Parton spent a lot of time in New Orleans and the American South. What’s hard to wrap your hands around is the bizarre fact that this music is coming out of cosmopolitan Vancouver, not Nashville or Memphis.
“I do plan to return to the States again at some point to live, but there is something special about being Canadian,” she said. “I don’t know if it has to do with Canadian music. Canadian folk music wasn’t really a big influence on me, other than, of course, the great Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot. For me, what really informs my being a Canadian artist is the landscape.
“More than anything, the rural environment here, the space … it’s a really big part of what I identify with.”
Parton grew up in north Vancouver, decidedly outside of the big city. Her family took vacations “in the middle of nowhere,” she said. One of her favorite childhood memories involves her walking out of the front door of her home and being in the woods less than a minute later.
“I could walk forever and never see another person, so having that around – mountains that went on and on forever – was a part of my childhood that I loved,” she said. “It’s one of the things I love about Canada, and it’s also one of the things I hate about Canada. Sometimes I need to go to New York City.”
When Parton thinks about living in America, she draws upon the six years she spent crisscrossing the country. She did some recording in Arkansas and worked in a convenience store in New Orleans. She waitressed all over,
busked on the street in Oregon, and first got paid for her music in Colorado – at 1996’s Telluride Bluegrass Festival. She called the $400 check “a revelation.”
Then she returned to Canada to plant trees. “I’m sure my parents were like, ‘Oh, God,”‘ she said.
But the experience not only infused her musical psyche with something distinctly American, it also was a giant geography lesson. Now she’s pondering moving to upstate New York, North Carolina or New Mexico, although not too soon.
“Now I have a home,” she said. “I have two pianos, and that’s been great, because I was really committed to a hobo lifestyle. To be honest, it wasn’t really all that well thought through. I was living out a dream, but …”
She sighs audibly.
“I’m glad that I eventually learned how to hold my hair.”
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
The Be Good Tanyas
ALT-COUNTRY|Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom, 2637 Welton St.; 7 p.m. Monday, featuring The Hollyfelds |$25|quixotes.com
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DJ LOGIC This jam band-friendly DJ always brings the party, and his gig Wednesday at Cervantes will be no different. More: quixotes.com.
MC LARS He calls his music “post-punk laptop rap,” but he’s best known for his ironic white-boy rap, “Signing Emo,” which tells the still-relevant tale of A&R cronies looking for the next Thursday or Dashboard. In this case, the band is called Hearts That Hate. And it’s hilarious, as fans will see Thursday at the Marquis. More: sodajerkpresents.com.
-Ricardo Baca
