When singer/songwriter Kathryn Calder (The New Pornographers/ex-Immaculate Machine) finally began to record her own solo albums, she noticed something about her music she didn’t notice before.
“Whenever you put a whole bunch of songs together back to back, you start to realize what you tend to do as a songwriter,” says Calder, who used to call Victoria home and now lives in Vancouver. “When I was writing songs for an Immaculate Machine album and I had collaborators, those guys were helping me finish songs so we always had multiple heads working together.”
Calder says that while she was writing her first solo album, Are You My Mother?, she noticed during production that the tunes would sound awfully familiar. So when it came time to head into the studio for her new album, Bright and Vivid, she kept that in mind.
“I was aware that I actively had to be careful of the choices I was making when I was songwriting,” she says. “So that’s why on the new record there are songs that have different structures.”
Experimenting with the structures of the songs on the new album was also Calder having more fun with the songwriting process. She was trying to avoid writing songs that had a regular pop structure, and in the process she took more chances.
“We had the luxury of being able to just add layer upon layer of sounds, and we were just trying to be crazier,” she says. “Those are the kinds of records I love—the records that are busy and they have lots going on and there’s lots of melodies and lots to listen to. I like those records a lot.”
An aspect of songwriting and creating music that really interests Calder is how at times she feels like she’s just a passive conduit—she has her critical side that helps her write her songs and pick what works, but she doesn’t always know where her melodies come from.
“Where melodies come from, like how they just show up one day and not another day—that’s just a big mystery,” she says. “It’s just your brain at work, and it’s pretty cool to watch it happen. Because I don’t know where those songs came from, they kind of just showed up. Once I hear melodies that I like, then there’s the starting point of a song. So I have no idea what kind of songs I’m going to write next, but that’s the fun thing about process—you just never really know.”
Kathryn Calder
Lucky Bar
8 pm November 26, $10
kathryncalder.ca