LEFT BRAIN RIGHT BRAIN

CAN | There’s an extra administrative component to a collaborative album like this, and as a producer on this album (alongside Daniel Ledwell), how were you able to stay in both the creative and the logistical camps without muddling both?

JG ─ I had to schedule and organise it, but then when it was time to start writing in the sessions, there were no thoughts about logistics or coordination. It was all creative—and that’s just the way that life is, especially as a parent. Sometimes it was stressful because I was a very busy mother of two with a very small infant and a one-and-a-half year old. It was a lot, but I’m a project-oriented person. For me to keep my joy up, I like to be creating alongside motherhood, which I really love, so I just didn’t really stop working.

PAN-CANADIAN

CAN | This project is ambitious in the geographical spread of your collaborators. In Halifax alone, you invited Kim Harris, Aquakultre (Lance Samson), Bahamas (Afie Jurvanen), Ria Mae, and Joel Plaskett. You invited Toronto’s Basia Bulat and Amy Millan; on the West coast you called for Dan Mangan; and also featured Nunavut’s Joshua Quamariaq. Was there a deliberate effort to create something that is broadly Canadian?

JG ─ Yes, it was completely intentional. 

ORGANIZING DIVERSITY

CAN | There are two artists of colour on this album – Aquakultre and Quamariaq – which is of note in light how folk spaces can often feel exclusively white in demographic. How do you approach being intentional without being performative in regards to making this space more diverse?

JG ─ I think that’s just something that is good to ask yourself when you’re creating. Josh Q and I met when I was up in Iqaluit for a Thanksgiving show in 2018, and there was this living room gathering where he sang and I was really moved by his voice. I kept saying, “Oh, I just wanna sing with you!” And I don’t know if he thought I was serious or whatever, because he seemed pretty shy to me, but I just asked him if he wanted to do this and he said yes. I was just so excited about having someone from Nunavut on the album because it’s really important to me if I’m making a Canadian collaboration project to represent as much of Canada as I can, but in an organic and natural way.

So, it’s not about forcing diversity but just having it in your life. Art represents life and records, for me, represent time capsules of my life. An important thing for me as a human being – and how I raise my children – is to always be open and excited for diversity, so it was very important to me that the record also demonstrates that. With Aquakultre, we became friends when our kids started hanging out—Lance has become one of my dearest friends, same with his whole family. And Lance is just such an incredible talent, so it was really important to me to try to write a song with him. It was just one of the funnest things to write that song together, and I just can’t wait to perform it. So I think it’s just art representing life, and making your life as diverse and inclusive as possible because, if not, you’re just missing out, you know?

BOYS OF SUMMER

CAN | Your take on Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” is a really compelling cover of that song, and it seems the subject matter seeped into Champagne Problems. The album closes with “The Closing Down of the Summer”, and opens with “Judy” (feat. Kim Harris) wherein the main character drives the same car famously mentioned in Henley song. To what extent is this album in dialogue with “Boys of Summer” and to what extent did you want to make this a specifically summer album?

JG ─ Take for example my album Compostela: a lot of that album is about losing my mother, and I wanted to kind of process all of my feelings around that and create something that had lightness to it. I’m not interested in making art that is heavy and is all about the dark sides of grief then letting that be the thing that lingers forever in the world. I wanted to make something that can lift people if possible.

So these stories and these songs with my collaborators were all born out of the pandemic – all written during the pandemic of course – but the after-effect of the record is to be something that is more like the summer and coming out of something dark. I also wanted to wait to put it out until it felt like there was a space in the time we’re living in to have something like that, where we’re ready to be lifted, so the timing of it is very intentional.

I really like the connection with the “Boys of Summer” because I did not know that. I did not think about that. “Judy” is a story of Kim’s parents—it is a record of her family history. We decided to give her dad a Cadillac in the song but he didn’t have a Cadillac in real life.

THREE’S COMPANY

CAN | “How I Loved You” is the result of the creative effort between yourself, co-writer Hannah Georgas, and featuring Amy Millan (from the band Stars). What engendered this three-way collaboration?

JG ─ Hannah and I wrote this song—it started to be a duet in my mind, but Hannah wanted to sing backing vocals and she didn’t wanna do the duet part of it. I really wanted her to, because I love Hannah and I love her voice so much, but for whatever reason she was like, “I don’t wanna make it a duet.” At that time when I was trying to figure that out with Hannah, Amy texted me and said something like, “What do I have to do to get us to sing a song together?” She didn’t even mean on this record; she just was saying something cute to me because she is such a sweetheart. Then I talked to Dan [Mangan] about it and I thought Amy’s voice would actually be so perfect on this song, and it just kind of developed into something really special.

And it almost seems like Kevin Drew [of Broken Social Scene] is part of this song too because, even though Kevin didn’t have anything to do with the writing, he really loved that song and wanted to make the video for it. And he’s kind of best friends with Amy, so this song just kind of kept becoming more and more of a collaboration, and it’s one of my favourites.

JOEL PLASKETT

CAN | “Rattled by Your Love” is both a tender ballad and your only solo song on the album, but with a little help from Joel Plaskett along the way.

JG ─ I wrote the song with Joel at his studio and it was a busy day – because I think I was breastfeeding my son and the other one was running around hitting stuff in Joel’s studio – but somehow we managed to write a song. I knew that Joel was talking to Dan and I could hear him talking about the production direction and they were both imagining a band and this whole other thing with guitars and stuff—and I was just feeling like it wasn’t my own yet. Then when I had some time, I thought, “I really wanna change everything about this. I wanna slow it down and I wanna cut a verse and I want it to be very intimate,” and Joel was super supportive and on board with that decision. I just love that song and I’m really happy with how it turned out. It almost felt like I was doing a cover of what we wrote—I like that. 

VISUAL ART

CAN | Your paintings “Sweet Northern Sun” and “Rebel Reveal” are currently on display at Prow Gallery in Halifax. What was the inspiration behind these two pieces?

JG ── My inspiration for visual art is very similar to when I began songwriting, very stream-of-consciousness. It’s a feeling of letting go and taking risks and losing time. You just get lost and you’re just nowhere and it’s just things coming through you—it’s like a physical act of love.

I was listening to the new Feist record a lot when I was painting “Rebel Reveal”, so sometimes I think that other people’s music kind of influences the direction of the painting. With “Rebel Reveal”, someone came over to my house one night when the painting was still in here and they were noticing a heartbeat rhythm in the middle of the painting that connects to a larger heart vessel. I think that it felt like a heartbeat while I was painting, but I let it go and didn’t really focus on it or anything, so it was interesting to have someone else note that. And that painting is called “Rebel Reveal” because it’s saying to other people: reveal yourself, reveal your deepest darkest truths and your bravest qualities. That is a rebellious move, to reveal and let yourself be an example of artistic freedom and risk.

“Sweet Northern Sun” is just in my mind, like a landscape of the bright Canadian sun kind of casting over what was a long winter, and the depths of gold and glory coming through.

LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION?

CAN | Your multifunctional studio space – which you’ve dubbed the “Azalea House” – is situated in a rural lakehouse. How does this environment contribute to your steady output in both the visual and performing arts? Would this output be possible while living in a city?

JG ─ I do think it’ll be possible anywhere, even within a city, because all of these things are kind of inside of me, or – not to sound too flaky – on the outskirts of the universe. It’s like you’re trying to tap into creative sources that are beyond you and beyond the physical environment. They can come from anywhere. I remember painting and writing songs for Honeymoon Punch in a little apartment in Cairo. They were coming from the beyond, basically.

We chose to move out here after my mother passed away because I always envisioned that, at the end of my life, maybe I would get to a point where I would take that step and move somewhere that was near the water and surrounded by trees. So when I lost my mother, I was like, “I need to make a big shift,” and I gave myself the gift of doing this move earlier. I sort of gave myself this place to work in the studio, trusting that I will be more productive and more creative because I have this space for myself.

It’s just the very beginning of it. I’ve just gotten in here and I haven’t recorded any music in here yet either, but I’m doing a lot of stuff, a lot of yard work. It feels like I’m thriving doing things outside.