Sometimes it takes a year or so of lived in experience to write a simple three and a half minute folk song encapsulating what happened and, if you’re lucky, a whiff of why. At least, that’s how it usually is for Toronto’s Sarah Greene, a songwriter, guitarist and music journalist whose songs – though hardly numerous – are often just right in an idiosyncratically simple-sounding, elegant, raw way.
Greene got her musical start in Wilco-inspired indie alt-country band The Pickups (2003 – 2008), whose Don Kerr-recorded Country Houses, City Streets EP charted on campus/community radio and was well-received by the CBC (“Country Houses” was a CBC Radio Song of the Day and was also featured in the Globe & Mail’s Essential Tracks section).
Greene’s debut solo album, 2011’s Toronto Blues, was recorded in a makeshift studio set up in David Celia’s Mississauga living room, with a wonderful band of friends, and saw her casually exploring more of the roots-rock spectrum – there’s a blues song (despite the title, just one), a bit of rockabilly, a funny old-school country song, a jangly Lucinda Williams-indebted love in (Home and Broken Hearted) – while still leaning heavily on Greene’s signature evocatively understated folk rock (Cold Day for Horses).
As she’s matured, her songs have somehow grown smaller, quieter and stronger, capturing a soulful weariness along with a spirit of experimentation that feels pure and renewed. Part of that spirit of renewal stems being immersed the milieu centred around Toronto’s not for profit Tranzac Club, where Greene works and plays. There, you’re just as likely to hear free jazz improvisers exploring the hinterlands of creative music as you are to hear a heart-felt song by one of Toronto’s unsung folk heroes . Many fruitful avante-folk collaborations have had their genesis this way, and Greene owes some of her eclectic group of collaborators to that juncture. Collaborators include classical/pop pianist Michael Holt (The Mommyheads), rising folk noir singer Abigail Lapell, country crooner Paul Kolinski (Heavy On The Willie) and Western New York’s David Gluck (Great Luck), whose background marries music for yoga and meditation with poetic folk rock.
Following in the footsteps of Jennifer Castle – one of the Tranzac community’s most venerated alum – Greene demoed a few songs for her second solo album at Sonology with Jeff McMurrich, who, incidentally, helped mix and master the Pickups’ home-recorded self-titled debut album over ten years ago.