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Come here a moment, please, there’s something I’d like you to listen to, something both familiar and new; a bird alighting on your windowsill, a book you’ve taken off the shelf falling open to the right page precisely when you need it to; the great ongoing time-travelling conversation…

I’ve been listening (on repeat, for days) to California Shutters, the new, quietly assured, subtly magnificent, enviably well-crafted sophomore album by Justin Orok, who I know through my work at The Tranzac, a small not-for-profit music venue that serves as a community hub for myriad interconnecting artistic communities, including free jazz improvisers, songwriters, and those in between.

Anakana Schofield read a passage today on Instagram from Roland Barthes’ The Preparation of the Novel, and I’m going to mangle this but Barthes was writing about the desire to write; how it stems from a certain kind of “jubilation” in reading; a specific, individualized understanding that inspires the reader to want to write stories like the ones they have read and loved but make them their own.

I suspect Orok has well-trodden a path to his local library branch, where he must have a substantial list of holds (we’re allowed up to 100 at a time here in Toronto, apparently).

California Shutters is bookended by songs about libraries, borrowing the metaphor of books and reading; and transposing that beautifully into song. “I’m in search of the ancient healing songs,” Orok sings on the opening track, “Little Library”. “No matter your age there’s always a page left to be turned, turned, turned. Every new day is a clean slate with so many words, words, words to learn.”

Only one song on this 30 minute long LP cracks the five minute mark (in the context of California Shutters, “Geoffrey Carter” is like the near-novella in a collection of short stories) and yet each song creates its own small world, complete with delightful puzzle-like intrinsic logic, its own vocabulary and a level of grace, kindness, empathy and humour that is rare; the mark of a brilliant story songwriter.

Orok settles into a typically unhurried tempo telling stories that make me wish Stuart McLean were still around (the father-son road trip of “Senior Year Shortstop,” especially). Songs that gently examine the way that our understanding of ourselves is deeply informed by our relationships with others, especially in pairs (the sisters in “It’s Always Been Easy,” the trio of adolescent duos in “Three Scenes From Ridgewood,” which has the most elegant lyrical and melodic structure I’ve encountered in a while).

Orok’s characters are human and fallible — “here lies Geoffrey Carter the third,” has a few meanings — but never caricatures; and I get the sense that when Orok has the option of choosing the easy rhyme he questions it, and makes himself find another one that is more surprising, less expected, which contributes to a living friction in the writing that lends the songs some of their staying power. We are not taking easy shots here.

But we are, apparently, sometimes singing about sports (“First-Line Centre”) and sometimes playfully creating a faux jingle for blinds (“California Shutters”) in which shyness can co-exist with wacky individualistic modern dance moves.

“Wishing Stone” is a meditative, mournful poem of a song that is deeply relatable, yet opaque enough, like water; while “Harry Goes To War,” revisited here after initially appearing on the Decoration Day album Makeshift Future in 2020, is rich with imagery and detail based on a true story shared by Orok’s grandfather in a letter.

I’ve talked a lot about words here; but these are gorgeous folk songs, backboned by Orok’s understated yet expert fingerstyle guitar, lap steel and dobro and handled with the utmost attentive care by some of Toronto’s best musicians, including Aline Homzy (violin), Karen Ng (also saxophone, alto clarinet and flute), Virginia MacDonald (clarinet), Craig Harley (piano), Michael Davidson (vibraphone) and Andrew Downing (bass). The chamber-folk arrangements and storytelling will inevitably invite comparisons to Andy Shauf, but there is a clarity and straightforwardness in Orok’s singing style that is purposefully, disarmingly, uniquely and sweetly his own.

Barnyard Records’ Jean Martin produced, mixed and mastered California Shutters (also played drums) and Andrew Chung contributed to the writing of the poignant closer “Lost and Found.” A particularly brilliant touch is the inclusion of The Lonesome Ace Stringband’s Chris Coole’s other-worldly banjo into this very spacious Tranzac-y mix, with Felicity Williams and Maggie Keogh dream-teaming on background vocals.

The music and melodies colour the margins in ways that seem to suggest that many of these tales have arbitrary endings and could easily extend; the lyrics end but the music carries on, propelling unspoken thoughts forward into wherever the characters go next.

── Sarah Greene, August 2024, originally published on Bandcamp