James Strecker Reviews the Arts

Not long ago, singer Marie-Lynn Hammond released not one but two CDs -Creatures, reviewed previously in this blog with highest praise, and Hoofbeats- both after a devastating accident. Upcoming soon are several gigs in Southern Ontario and Quebec. This interview took place on the singer’s 66th birthday on August 31, 2014. It comes in two parts below.

Part One

James Strecker: While listening to The Reluctant Angel on Creatures, I was moved by the artistry and grace with which you sing of your dead sister. I know from experience how difficult it is to write about such loss, so how did you manage going through the creation of the song and what is it like performing it?

Marie-Lynn Hammond: Actually, it’s not specifically about Denise, though it is inspired by losing her when she was only 47. Here’s what I wrote about “The Reluctant Angel” for the liner notes of Creatures: “This song began as some lyric ideas about two years after my sister died, but at the time I didn’t have the heart to complete it, and filed it away so well I forgot about it. When I found the file ten years later, I was surprised when I got to the last part—I hadn’t remembered where the story was going. I think I must have been influenced by Wim Wenders’ beautiful film, Wings of Desire.”

So the distance of a decade helped; my grief wasn’t so immediate when I completed the song. And the narrator in the song feels like someone I sort of channelled—a distinct character with a distinct voice, though not my sister. They share a premature death in common, but Denise knew she had terminal cancer and so was able to prepare for her death, inasmuch as one can. Whereas the narrator in Reluctant Angel is struggling because her death was sudden and totally unexpected.

I’ve only ever performed The Reluctant Angel twice live so far because I don’t perform much anymore. But, to be honest, another song about losing Denise called “Omaha,” from my 2003 CD Pegasus, is a much harder song to sing. I wrote it soon after Denise died, when I was beyond devastated, and everything it recounts actually happened to me, so it’s far more personal. But people are telling me they are blown away by “Angel.” I think that’s in part because of the arrangement on the CD and Marilyn Lerner’s inspired piano playing, but also because it deals with universal themes from an unusual perspective.

Well, I hope you weren’t expecting a short answer!

JS: Please tell us as much as you wish. Now the purity of spirit and unaffected vocal beauty in your singing of this poetic gem is deeply moving. On the other hand, it nowadays seems de rigueur in music one hears to go with affectation, simple-minded attitude, superficiality, cliché and unsophisticated technique in both song and performance. So, with your obviously high creative standards, do you feel out of place in this context?

MLH: I have no choice about the way I sing. My voice is, technically, an extremely limited instrument. I don’t have much power or a big range, and I lack a normal vibrato. I sing more or less plainly, but with emotion, because it’s all I can do!

As a result, I write to suit and compensate for my voice, to distract from its limitations. I write stories with plots, I try to incorporate moving or powerful imagery, or, in some songs, humour. I know many of my songs can be demanding of the listener, and I know they’re not for everyone. But I don’t think much about what other people are doing. There’s no point wondering why Miley Cyrus is probably a millionaire by now, whereas I’m hovering around the poverty line. That way madness lies! I’m just happy to know that my music touches certain people.

JS: How do you manage to create lyrics that are both, at one time, poetic and literate? Is it difficult? How long does a song take?

MLH: Thanks for the compliment—from a poet, that’s fine praise. I don’t know how I do it. I’ve always loved words and savoured them for their evocative powers, their nuances. I wrote my first poem at age five—dictated it to my mother. 

Sometimes I’ve wished I could write more abstractly, more vaguely and mysteriously, so that listeners would ponder what the heck I meant by any given phrase. But that’s just not me, I guess. I like to tell stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, though not every song on Creatures is like that. So that structure dictates a certain amount of clarity. And then I want to make my listeners see, hear, taste, feel; I want to take them through a range of emotions. And that dictates poetic, and often concrete, imagery.

As for how long a song takes to write, it varies, but I’m generally a slow writer. I laugh when I hear songwriters say, “It took me three whole days to write this tune!” I’ve rarely taken less than three weeks, or even three months, to write a song. I craft and tinker and edit. Factual story songs, like “Children of Peace” about a breakaway Quaker sect that built the Sharon Temple in the early 1800s , can take a year or more, because of doing the research, and then looking for the way into the story—who’s telling it and why? And it can be a real pain trying to cram a complex story into five minutes or so, AND make each line rhyme perfectly!

Exact rhymes in songs are a minor obsession of mine. I don’t always succeed, but I try. And yet, other than in classic music theatre, no one seems to care any more about perfect rhymes. Sad, that. I think it’s part of the musicality of songs, those little sound echoes. Of course sometimes I eschew them completely, as in “Electric Green.” about The Oak Ridges Moraine. I knew I wanted the song to mention rare or endangered species in that area, and that rhyming little bluestem or Blanding’s turtle was going to be near impossible.

JS: Your love of animals and of the earth resonate deeply in your songs, so could you explain somehow this profound and a very personal connection?

MLH: I can’t really explain it. It’s always been there, since I was a tiny child. I came to consciousness around the family dog and, since I was an only child for almost four years, he was like a sibling to me. Then I met my first horse when I was three or four, and I was a goner. Cats came much later, but horses and cats became my totem animals, my yin and yang, prey and predator, forcing me to deal with those inherent contradictions.

Then, when I was eleven, we started spending summers at Lac Simon in Quebec. I spent long days roaming the woods and meadows and shoreline, and nature became both an adventure and an escape from my dysfunctional family life.

When my sister Denise was dying, and in the months after her death, my only break from thinking about her or from going mad with grief came when I was riding a horse or doing cat rescue work, especially working with feral cats and kittens. In those situations, you have to be very present and in the moment, because that’s where animals live. On a horse, you have to be relaxed yet aware: what is the horse paying attention to? Is it going to spook because there’s a coyote up ahead? With a feral cat/kitten, you need to sense where it’s at: how fearful is it? Will it just huddle in a ball, or will it bite or lash out? You kind of mind-meld with it, and from there work on gaining its trust. When you get that first purr, it’s magic. Being in the moment with animals is like a combination of psychotherapy and Zen.

JS: Several of your songs on Creatures show another profound connection –to Canadian history and to people who have lived it. Please tell us more. Are you thus inclined because you are French-Canadian? Because you are a feminist?

MLH: I am a feminist, yes, but that’s kind of separate from, or maybe parallel to, my cultural nationalism—although I’m sure I wasn’t the only feminist back in the day who thought that Canada’s relationship to the USA was like that of women to the patriarchy—and we know who’s always been screwed in that relationship.

I guess my interest in Canadian history and culture began when Bob Bossin and I started Stringband in the early 70s. Canadian cultural nationalism was in bloom then; many writers, poets, musicians and filmmakers were trying to articulate what it meant to be Canadian—as opposed to being a British colony or an American cultural colony. So we consciously decided to write about Canadian themes.

And yes, since I’m half Anglo and half French Canadian (well, three-eighths, with one eighth Abenaki in the mix), I felt like a human microcosm of Canada and wanted to express both sides of me.

Our first album was called Canadian Sunset, and I have a song on it called “Vancouver” and another one that mentions the Ottawa River and “Sunday mornings in a small Quebec town.” This was fairly revolutionary at the time, to mention Canadian things in songs. Other than Ian & Sylvia and Gordon Lightfoot, no one was really doing it. And the first song I ever wrote in French is on that album. Bob Bossin’s penned some great tunes with real Cancon too: “Dief Is the Chief,” “Maple Leaf Dog,” and lots more.

So Creatures includes four Canadian-history-themed songs, if you include “Electric Green” -a history of the Oak Ridges Moraine, but also an environmental cri de Coeur- to bring attention to these amazing stories that many Canadians are unaware of.

JS: You have written songs with a wry and satirical edge on issues especially relevant to the lives of women in our patriarchal culture. What were these issues you addressed and, knowing what women must endure, how do you manage to go the route of wryness and not anger? If you were to do a new CD of topical songs, what issues or people of any kind would you address?

MLH: Let’s see: with my tongue in my cheek, I’ve addressed menopause, birth control, menstruation and reusable menstrual pads in “Period Piece,” men and housework, younger men and older women and vice versa, women and the Catholic Church in “Leave Room for the Holy Ghost,” the preference for boy children over girls, and more. I think humour is a great way to treat these issues, because it gets you further than anger does—at least with the males in the audience. And people who are laughing have a harder time being defensive.

I’ve also written a couple of non-satirical songs that celebrate female friendship, and some serious songs that touch on women’s issues in the context of other themes. For example, “Flying/Spring of ’44” is told by the wife of a WWII pilot who returns home a broken man and an alcoholic, so we get a glimpse of how that war affected women even if they did not see combat, as some do now.

And I’ve written a song, “Sixth Day of December” which is not on any of my albums, for the women killed in the Montreal Massacre. Even in these cases, I tend to avoid direct anger, or at least I avoid blaming, unless it’s appropriate to the narrator. Punk bands do a good job of being raw and angry in music, but I’d just sound silly if I tried to do that. I prefer to tell stories with a believable narrator, as in “Flying,” or to write something more elegiac, as in the case of the December 6th song.

If I were to write some new topical songs, I’d like to take on factory farming, but it’s hard to be funny or satirical about the suffering of billions of animals. Instead I’m working on a song about Esther the Wonder Pig, because that’s a good-news story about a rescued pig who’s changing a lot of lives. And I’m currently repurposing a song I wrote about former premier Mike Harris to discuss Herr Harper and how he’s wrecking Canada. Stay tuned!

JS: The production on Creatures shows discerning insight into how to make each cut musically seductive and aurally appealing, so please tell us about the many smarts that went into producing the actual musical sounds of your CD.

MLH: Well, my producer, David Woodhead, is a near musical genius—that helps.  He always has great ideas for arrangements, and unlike me, he knows theory and reads and writes music. But it wasn’t as if he was always imposing his concepts on my songs; if I had an idea, he’d be game to try it out.

We’ve done three albums together now, so he’s gotten very good at translating my often clumsy notions (“Hey David, I’m thinking something sort of chukka-chukka, like a Telecaster with the strings muted—or maybe on synth—know what I mean?!”) into actual musical sounds. Also, he plays any number of instruments really well, so he’d pick up, say, the mandolin and play along to the song; then he’d try out a high-strung guitar or a lap steel or whatever, and we’d keep going till we found what worked.

For me, it’s about showcasing the lyrics and the stories as opposed to flashy playing or effects for their own sake, and David gets that. We always look for that magical sound or note that will enhance or elevate or express emotion. It helps too that David plays beautifully, and with feeling—you can hear him on every cut on the CDs.

I also have to credit my long-time accompanist Tom Leighton, in particular for his huge musical contributions to “Children of Peace.” He played piano and did the band arrangement on that track. And for “Newfoundland Pony” he wrote an original jig that weaves in and out of the tune, and he plays accordion, piano, and bodhran on it.

JS: We should say something about that horrible accident you had and your recovery. Tell us about both.

MLH: In August 2006, my usually quiet horse, Beau, suddenly and inexplicably began to buck—most likely because of a wasp sting. I was thrown and knocked unconscious and sustained various broken bones and concussion, bleeding in the brain, and damage to one of the cranial nerves connected to my right eye. Long story short, I now have a permanent visual disability: I see double whenever I move my head or eyes, which affects my balance.

Sadly, I had to sell my horse, because for a long while we didn’t know what my prognosis was. And I couldn’t work after the accident, so I couldn’t afford to pay his bills. But my Stringband partner Bob Bossin organized two sold-out benefit concerts for me, and I was incredibly touched at the number of musicians who volunteered to perform and number of friends and fans who attended. The money raised allowed me to convalesce for over a year and pay for alternative treatments not covered by OHIP.

Eight years later, I’ve learned to work around the disability to a fair extent, though some things I don’t do anymore, like ride a bike, because of my balance problems. But I started riding horses again less than a year after the accident at a facility that accommodates people with disabilities. Horses are far more stable than bikes, because they have a leg in each corner—that is, until they get stung by wasps. And I’m still riding—very carefully of course!—because I can’t stay away from horses.

Part Two

JS: Since I haven’t played my copy of your CD HoofBeats yet, would you set us up on what to look for in the songs and also tell us about the background of the songs and what they mean to you.

MLH: The album is a celebration of horses of all kinds: wild horses, heavy horses, rescued horses, war horses, even mythical horses -one song is about Pegasus- and some specific breeds, like the Quarter Horse, the rare cheval canadien, or Canadian horse -Canada’s national breed, but lots of people don’t know about it!- and the endangered Newfoundland Pony. There’s also a funny song called “The Naughtiest Pony,” which most pony owners can relate to, because ponies are often very naughty!

A friend pointed out that while most of the songs on Creatures deal with loss of various kinds, the songs on HoofBeats tend to be positive, or at least uplifting—even the ones with slightly darker themes. HoofBeats and Creatures actually have two songs in common: “Emily Flies”—about a girl with disabilities and the rescue horse she rides in a therapeutic program; and “Newfoundland Pony”—about the only pony breed, now severely endangered, to have evolved in Canada. And both those songs are, I think, a mix of dark and light. I’ve also been told by people who are not especially horse folk that they love HoofBeats for the stories, the melodies, and that positivity.

JS: Do you miss being part of a folk duo, as you once were, and doing cool things like touring in Russia during unthawed times and doing records and gigs? Do you often think back?

MLH: Stringband was actually a trio to start—the fiddler was a big part of the band—and then we added a bass player and became a quartet. I miss the fun of working out arrangements with my bandmates and creating that fuller band sound.

And Stringband did get some great gigs in its heyday: we toured the Arctic, we played a world’s fair in Japan, we toured Mexico for the Canadian embassy there, and yes, we spent a month performing in the former USSR in 1983. But I’m not sure I miss being the only woman touring with three guys and a male soundman! When I used to have bad menstrual cramps an hour before going on stage, I got NO sympathy.

Stringband does still get together every decade or so for a few gigs, so that’s been fun. Especially now that menstrual cramps are a thing of the past. 

And in my parallel solo career I’ve usually performed with a pianist/keyboardist and sometimes bass too, so I’ve been able to employ a richer, fuller sound that way. I love piano, but I can’t play it, despite two years of lessons as an adult. In my next life I’ll get piano lessons as a kid. I’m probably the only middle-class child in North America who didn’t.

JS: What’s the hardest thing about writing a song? Is it easier in French or in English?

MLH: To me the hardest thing about writing a song is waiting for the muse to strike. I get lots of intellectual ideas for songs, but until I feel that mysterious, inspirational, emotional connection to a subject, I know it’s not going to work. And my muse must be a lazy creature, because she doesn’t strike that often. Which is why I tend to do only one or two albums per decade. And also because I’m picky—I try to write about things I haven’t heard others write songs about, or to write about ordinary topics in an unordinary way. Which means I discard a lot of ideas.

As for language, it’s far easier in English, because although I spoke French first, English quickly took over as my primary tongue. When I was growing up we spoke way more English at home and we moved a lot, mostly to English-speaking communities—all due to my military Anglophone father. So all my schooling was in English. But I often collaborate with a terrific French poet, Paul Savoie. He gives me lyrics, I sometimes do a little editing, and then I set his beautiful words to music. “Le Cheval Sauvage,” on Creatures, is one of our collaborations, and another environmental cri de coeur.

JS: Tell us about writing plays. How does being a playwright affect how you write your songs and how you sing them?

MLH: I think of my playwriting career as just one phase in my storytelling life. I became a playwright because some of the things I wanted to write were too long and complex to fit into the song format. I wrote only four plays (one was very short, for a ten-minute-play festival), though they were all professionally produced—one of them several times.

And then I just stopped, because I didn’t get any strong story ideas that needed to be a play. At that point I began working on a story that wanted to be a novel. But I abandoned it after my parents died eight weeks apart and my sister was diagnosed four weeks later with terminal cancer. She died 17 months later. As you can imagine, that was not a time conducive to creativity. It took years before I even wrote another song.

I’m not sure my time in the theatre affected the writing of my songs, but it did affect my performance. I played myself in my first play, which featured the contrasting and dramatic stories of my French grandmother and my English one. But I gave myself only songs to sing, no spoken lines, because I’m actually at heart rather shy and I felt self-conscious whenever I tried to “act.” However, I learned stagecraft during those runs, and watching the terrific actors who played my grandmothers helped me to really inhabit my songs, especially if I’d written a narrator into them. And being in theatre helped me better shape my concert performances in terms of presentation and pacing, for example. I make more eye contact with my audience, I try to keep the show moving, I build each set to a climax, things like that.

JS: You’re so bloody versatile. Tell us now what it was like having a national broadcast on CBC radio. What did you like about doing radio and what do think of radio today?

MLH: I loved doing radio. I sort of fell into it, and CBC gave me very little training, so I learned on the fly. In those days (1987-91), shows were actually more scripted, I think, than some of them are today, so I probably had less freedom when interviewing guests than some hosts have today. Bigger budgets allowed for more staff and producers, and every one had their own little area they wanted to shape a certain way, so I had less input and less hands-on control than hosts probably do now.

But I loved the magic that often happened on the second show I hosted, Musical Friends, which was built around my skills and my experience as a musician. A format we used a lot involved inviting three musicians with something in common, e.g., a classical guitarist, a jazz guitarist, and an acoustic finger-style guitarist. The three would never have met or played together before, but if my producers and I got the mix right, they’d not only answer my interview questions individually, they’d talk to one another, compare notes, and joke around. And at the end they’d actually transcend their genres and play a tune together! I still have people come up to me today and tell me how much they loved that show and miss it.

I also loved being able to showcase great Canadian talent that had never had a national radio airing before. Our show was about 95% Canadian content.

As for radio today, well, that’s a huge topic and I am SO not an expert! There are thousands of stations available on the Web, for one thing—who’s got the time? I’m an inveterate CBC listener, and I’m sad to hear the decline in quality, especially on CBC Radio 2. Some days I find myself switching over to CIUT.

It’s not that I miss all the classical programming; I enjoy classical, but it’s not my favourite genre. It’s other things that bug me, besides the ads, of course, so blame Harper and his Cons for budget cutbacks. I find that on the non-specialized music shows, they have their musical darlings and don’t stray very far from a narrow range of indie pop/roots stuff. You can hear the same damn song every damn day on different shows if you listen a lot. An exception is Laurie Brown’s The Signal, which plays more varied and adventurous music. The Radio 2 Top 20 show is just dumb, and here’s my CBC sour grapes gripe: you rarely hear the network play anyone over 40 who isn’t a rock ’n’ roller. And now I’m going to shut up.

JS: You’re also a professional editor. Is it true that writing is in the editing? What are the problems that writers tend to have that you must remedy as you edit? Minette Walters once told me that being an editor had had a positive effect on her own writing and I wonder if that is the case with you.

MLH: Is writing in the editing? Good editing is of course invisible; you don’t see what the editor fixed or took out. Good editing really can help make good writing better. But the writing talent has to be there to start. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

As for the problems I deal with when I edit other people’s writing? Self-publishing is so easy now that everyone’s writing a book and wants to see it in print, often before it’s ready. With fiction I see weak story structure, weak plot, weak characterization, bad dialogue, too much flowery description, not enough description, overwritten prose. Novice writers often can’t help using three or four adjectives where one, or even none, will do, and more.

Yes, I’d say that learning how to edit has definitely helped my own writing. Apart from the playwriting, I’ve mostly written nonfiction for magazines, though I may be embarking on a collaborative project that involves fiction; that’s all I can say about it for now. But it’s also hard to be objective. You really need an outside set of eyes on your own work. And sometimes being an editor can induce paralysis in the writer part of me. I’ll agonize over the syntax of a simple sentence and consult endless style guides, when I should just move on and keep writing.

JS: Some easy penultimate sectioned questions: Who are you? What made you the person you are? What are your deepest beliefs? How hopeful are you about yourself and about the world?

MLH: “Easy”? I believe you’re being ironic, James! I think in the rest of this interview I’ve suggested a number of factors that answer those questions, but here’s my “easy” answer: who I am can be found in my songs and song lyrics, my plays, and articles, many of which are available on my website. My CD Pegasus, BTW, is also a CD-ROM, and I believe the text of my first play, the one about my grandmothers, Beaux Gestes & Beautiful Deeds, is included. That play is also published in the anthology Canadian Mosaic II. So there!

As for how hopeful I am about the world—not very. I just hope I’m dead before the last tiger or elephant in the wild becomes extinct. I don’t want to live to see that.

JS: And of what value are the arts in our world?

MLH: Oh, that’s a huge one too. And it also depends on how you define the arts. Is what Katy Perry does art? I don’t know. But she’s clearly “valued”—in both senses of that word—far more highly than you or I.

In general, I wish the arts were considered of greater value than they are, at least here in Canada. I have a musician friend in Denmark who told me that the musicians’ union there is a real union. I think you have to have a certain skill level to join, but once you’re in, they take care of you really well. I believe he was getting a kind of unemployment insurance at one point when he wasn’t gigging much. If we valued our artists properly, the term “starving artist” wouldn’t exist. Maybe it helps to suffer for your art, but geez, there’s a limit!

Anyway, I think a world without art would be a poor, dull, boring place. Whether art is “high” or “low,” it has the power to move, inspire, comfort, delight, amuse, enlighten, challenge, transport, and more. It can bring about minor epiphanies and it can fuel major revolutions. It can help humans escape, if only temporarily, whatever personal or societal hell they may be experiencing at a given moment. It can also make them face truths that might be unpalatable in another form. The ability to create art is one of the good things about the human animal; it helps in part to compensate for the human animal’s other ability to do unspeakable things to its fellow humans and fellow animals and to the planet it inhabits.

Now isn’t that a cheery note for me to end on?! And, yes, forget what your grade 9 teacher told you: it’s perfectly fine to end a sentence with a preposition.

JS: Okay, how can people buy copies of your CDs and find out about your gigs? Where should they go to?

MLH: Go to my website, please. http://marielynnhammond.com/ More than you ever wanted to know about me can be found there, CDs can be ordered, and you can sign up on the Connect page for my newsletter, which goes out once in a blue moon, because a) like many artists I’m a terrible self-promoter, and so it will not clog your inbox; and b) I only perform once in a blue moon.

That said, I have three rare gigs coming up—listed on my homepage—in Cobourg, Morin Heights, and near Perth, and maybe a couple more in early November and early December that will get listed eventually. Catch me soon, though, because I’m calling these gigs my [First] Farewell Tour!