Basia Bulat had a rough year; someone close to her passed away, and she did what she had to do to get through it. She wrote songs. A lot of them. And in so doing, the young Toronto native has crafted her most personal and moving record to date in Tall Tall Shadow, which was released yesterday.
“I just needed to deal with it, and it really came out in all the songs,” she says.
“I feel really lucky to have a way to sort of talk about that stuff. It is really hard for me to talk about.”
This is grown-up Bulat, with her trademark autoharp taking a back seat to piano and the addition of electronic elements. Her vocals have never sounded better, her sound much more expansive. This is breakthrough record material not unlike what, for example, Serena Ryder has done with her new album.
Unlike previous efforts, Bulat took a cue from Tony Dekker, of Great Lake Swimmers fame, and looked for unique locations in which to record some songs for the album.
She found the ideal place in an old union hall in the Beaches neighbourhood of Toronto.
“It was this old dance hall. It was a real flashback, blue and yellow. I just wanted to find somewhere interesting, and I was looking around in different places,” she explains.
“It was around lunchtime, and there was this jazz band playing, and it just sounded so great. And I thought, there is live music happening, this must be the place.”
Bulat grew up in a musical household in Etobicoke and started taking piano lessons when she was just three years old (her mother was a piano teacher).
“Music was a big part of my life growing up,” she says. “My brother plays percussion, and we were always playing together. My brother plays all the drums on my records.”
She moved to London, Ont., to attend the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), where she took her first steps performing.
“London has always been so supportive of me. I feel like the city really adopted me,” she says. “It wasn’t part of a larger commercial music industry but a small, close-knit scene, which was kind of nice.”
At first, she was safely hidden from view at local campus radio station CHRW. She remembers encountering the aforementioned Great Lake Swimmers singer Tony Dekker at a local show, shaking like a leaf. A lot has changed.
The first time she appeared onstage, at the urging of her friends, was to appear as the opening act for Julie Doiron of Eric’s Trip fame.
Since then, Bulat has turned out two critically acclaimed albums and toured relentlessly, building a solid reputation for her songwriting, her enthusiasm for the autoharp and for her drop-dead gorgeous voice.
With her new, very personal album, things could change for the better. But Bulat is just hoping for a little understanding.
“I hope people connect to something in it even though it’s a pretty personal thing I’ve made,” she says. “I hope it reminds them of something they are going through and maybe see themselves in there somehow. I really wanted to send something hopeful out into the world, and I’m hoping that maybe I achieved that.”
Basia Bulat appears in concert at the Polish Combatants Hall on Oct. 10, 11, 12