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Angela
Desveaux |
If Angela Desveaux could have three
pictures in her wallet, she says they would be of Gillian Welch,
Lucinda Williams, and her grandmother. These are the figures she holds
dear and suggest the influences that have shaped her musical identity.
Wandering Eyes is a sparkling country debut that highlights both
Desveaux’s brilliant voice and her poignant song writing, inspired by
those heroes with an alt.country twist.
Angela Desveaux was born in a suburb on the south shore of Montreal,
but spent her early years in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the home of her
family and her musical heritage. “All the residents of Cape Breton are
music lovers and players,” says Desveaux, ” and that’s what I
inherited from them.” Cape Breton is an island of small fishing towns
surrounded by mountains and sea, and known for its unique style of
music developed from traditional Irish and Scottish folk and fiddle
sounds. “The fiddle music there has a specific style and it’s very
nostalgic,” says Desveaux. “You look out a window and you see the
Atlantic Ocean and hear that fiddle music playing in the background,
and there you have the closing credits to your life.”
Her own music hints at a similar air of nostalgia, with lyrical twists
and a jaded edge that are straight-up country. “My parents listened to
more country music than residents of Nashville,” she says. “From the
old classics -- Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams, Roger Miller, George
Jones, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn -- to the modern cheese. But I
prefer the former.” More than just shaping what she listened to,
Desveaux’s family was also where she began playing music. “There were
always those drunken-folk jamboree sing-a-longs at my parents’ place.
Dad and my older brother Darrell played guitar, my uncle the piano and
Mom sang. Then she would bring the party down a notch when she would
beg me to sing all my favourite country ballads. My dad and my mom
pushed me a lot to keep singing – I think she always wanted to be a
singer herself.”
The Desveaux family returned to Montreal when Angela was ten. There
Darrell joined a rock band and Angela found a new kind of musical
inspiration. “I didn’t realize what the Desveauxs could do until I saw
my brother wearing a mask with a long mod haircut, jumping off amps
and screaming into a mic in front of my high school. I sang back-ups
in his band, then started to play and sing with other girls like me.”
“I rebelled against my country roots for a while, ‘til I discovered
the Flying Burrito Brothers, The Byrds, Gram Parsons and Son Volt, and
they made everything all right again,” she says. ”In this little local
bar in Montreal called Barfly, they had a bluegrass open-mic on Sunday
nights. I started singing there and met a lot of musicians and singers
that I still work with today. We have a great close community of
musicians and recording studios in Montreal, and there is a lot of
project- and band-swapping going on.”
By the late ’90s, the now-28 year old Desveaux was singing backup and
playing guitar with a number of Montreal bands. She gained attention
as a member of a country group, the Sonny Best Band, and kept up with
her bluegrass and song writing on the side. “I felt very comfortable
in the bluegrass environment - when I hear and play that kind of
music, it always feels like I’m going home,” Desveaux says.
She slipped a demo of some of her songs to Howard Bilerman, recording
engineer, owner of Hotel2Tango Studio and former drummer of the Arcade
Fire. He was so impressed that he not only offered to record her, but
offered to play drums for her as well. Desveaux also says that
Bilerman has since helped guide her, “to keep me going and focused.
Through recording songs with Howard, I met a lot of musicians who
played rock music who were interested in playing with me. My older
recordings were very acoustic, but for this record, I wanted to hear
my songs played with a rock band.” Desveaux asked Brian Paulson (Slint,
Superchunk, Wilco, Archers of Loaf) to record the album, “so I could
push it in this direction as much as possible.”
On Wandering Eyes, Angela Desveaux takes the influences of her youth
and blends them seamlessly into her well-crafted pop songs with her
voice as the centerpiece. “I feel strong in my songs,” she says, and
the result is a remarkably self-assured debut.
www.angeladesveaux.com |
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