Marie- Lynn Hammond’s superb new CD, Creatures, is a work of finely realized imagination, seamless artistry and delightful variety. Sometimes this gently potent collection does heavy duty work in the fibers of the heart and does so with grace, composure and inspiring humanity. Other times, while listening, one takes in the seductive spontaneity of these songs and is eager for more of life’s contradictory realities. As well, with producer David Woodhead’s rich but discreet imagination in control, and with his remarkable sense of rightness at play throughout, Creatures, with its twelve songs, is both profoundly moving and a lot of fun.
Creatures begins with the spritely-stepping A Dream Last Night and its reality-bending lyrics that would make Bunuel smile: “I dreamed of you and you were dreaming of me dreaming of you.” Life’s Like That follows with a run of evocative images that reflect the ubiquitous effects of chance in our lives. One goes along easily with Hammond’s stance of philosophical acceptance of life’s trials until reading, in her notes in the enclosed booklet, that the song ensued from the singer’s horrendous, life-changing accident. Still, she summarizes, almost matter of fact, that “some lessons were learned.” Emily Flies, “inspired by terrific kids and horses I met at therapeutic riding facilities” involves a young girl who “doesn’t really talk” and “uses canes to help her walk.” With the girl now seated on the back of a discarded horse Cody, now used in therapy, we find that, free from the prison of her condition, “Emily flies”.
Thomas Foster, with its unforced compassion and subtle turns in the lyrics, explores, in perfectly judged narration, one’s attempt to resolve impossible grief. There are many gut-wrenching moments on this CD and the song’s conclusion is one. We have a progression here and begin with the singer declaring “and I too called on Art and Beauty but ….. the muses all forsook me and it very nearly broke me for I had no other faith to see me through.” Then the artist returns to her art, in order to deal with life’s tragedies, and sings “by the light of the evening star for the first time in seven years I picked up my guitar.” In Le Cheval Sauvage, en francais, Hammond uses the back and forth format one finds in riddle songs of folk music and considers the loss of life – whales, horses, storks – on our planet. Its pleasing manner carries a heavy subject, but I can’t imagine any listener not singing along.
Children of Peace shows Hammond’s knack for melding historical narration, here of the Quakers, with its inner spiritual momentum. This is a celebratory, dignified, and very human account that stands hymn-like and firm on Canadian soil. Electric Green takes on the ruination of our naturally evolved earth by unchallenged development. In a collection rich with many unobtrusive hooks, one again naturally joins in on the catchy “two hundred twenty five acres for sale zoned industrial, zoned industrial.” The notes tell us that Hammond lives “on the edge of the Oak Ridges Moraine which runs across southern Ontario” and her detailed account of the richness of natural life now made vulnerable strikes home.
Silver Boy is a loving tribute to Hammond’s companion cat. Hammond has a knack for encapsulating complex issues – here our homocentric attitude to cats as toys and fads – and her mastery of honed lyric writing serves her purpose concisely and well. She also celebrates the intimacy of human connection with one’s cat: “I can tell he senses how I feel ‘cause he whimpers when I cry … I have dated men with far less appeal.” Newfoundland Pony, meanwhile, is a rousing, elbow-swinging, heels on plank floors tribute to the Newfoundland Pony and one can easily imagine it sung everywhere on the Rock. The tune is catchy, idiomatically unforced and, like the other songs, it addresses forces that threaten our life on this planet. Stormy’s Song is straight ahead upper stuff about a dog once “trapped in a pound in Ohio, frozen in terror on death row.” It expresses a love uncluttered by sentimentality and, like the dog Stormy in the song, this cut is full of “boundless joy.”
A friend, in something of a confessional mood, once declared that when he listened to Hammond sing, he felt he was having an affair with her. Indeed Hammond possesses an intimate and very feminine voice that reaches far below the clichés of pop music to a place where nakedness of existence is the reality. Do You Remember is a song of longing memory concisely rendered as in “who said ‘stay’ and who said ‘I don’t know.’” I suspect that Do You Remember will be taken up by other singers for their repertoires.
This will certainly be the case with Reluctant Angel, a potential classic by any standard. In this deeply poignant song, Hammond assumes the voice of her dead sister. However, “Oh how I miss the world, I miss the senses and emotion, the pulse of blood, and sun on skin” is not the voice of a dead woman with no life in her but of one who so much wants to still be alive. It always hurts doubly to find words for one’s losses and Hammond does so with admirable dignity, as she explores the truth of human feeling with genuine artistry. As a result, one feels open to being real.
In sum, Creatures proves to be an exemplary union of craftsmanship and deep feeling magically united in giving voice to human truth. The songs are sometimes playful and sometimes the quintessence of poignancy. Hammond is a versatile songwriter and a compelling story teller. Her delivery is open-hearted, evocative, and warm as she sings of urgencies that vulnerable human beings and other creatures endure. Her distinctively beautiful voice is quietly radiant and personal, nuanced and heartbreakingly sincere. And no matter the pain implicit in some of the songs, this CD is a masterfully-rendered creation that is thoroughly compelling. Creatures is a gem and few singer-songwriters do their art better than this.