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SARAH HARMER PROVES THAT GOOD SONGS COME TO THOSE WHO WAIT.
BY SEAN PLUMMER
Remember Sarah Harmer? In September 2000, a lifetime ago in
pop culture terms, the singer with Kingston, ON’s Weeping Tile
released a solo album, You Were Here. A few attentive critics
immediately raved about her sad but beautiful folk songs, but it took
everyone else a little longer to catch on. They did, though, and soon
enough Harmer saw the tiny clubs she was playing give way to mid-sized
concert halls and an appearance on The David Letterman Show.
The singles ‘Basement Apartment.’ and ‘Don’t Get
Your Back Up’ migrated from college to mainstream radio and MuchMusic
put her videos into rotation. Time even voted You Were Here
the best debut CD of 2000.
The road beckoned for two years before the album’s
momentum finally slowed and Harmer’s thoughts could turn towards
a new record.
"I think that my former self could have been
even more ‘oh my God, I’ve got to put a record out,’"
she says. "I don’t know if my ambitions decreased or what
but I was surprising myself by how long I was taking. Because I think
I have an internal clock kind of going ‘okay, come on!’"
Some blame for the nearly four-year gap between records
has to be attributed to Harmer’s lifestyle. Born a farm girl, the
singer lives in rural Kingston with a roommate and her cat G-Puss, meaning
the regular jams and rehearsals that made Weeping Tile relatively prolific
are a thing of the past. These days, Harmer, whose current band members
reside in and around Toronto ("I wish everybody would move to Elginburg!"),
is mostly left to her own songwriting devices.
But the depth of feeling and keenness of observation
in her music – the very qualities which have won Harmer so many
admirers – do not come overnight. Instead, they’re the reward
of experience and becoming comfortable with herself.
"I’m more sensitive to stuff now,"
the 33-year old says. "I think I’m a little more accepting
of my sensitivity and I think it’s a good thing. I used to be ‘oh,
I’m too sensitive about everything.’ But now I’m like
‘no, that’s okay. I don’t want to get desensitized.’"
Keeping her distance from Toronto, Los Angeles and
New York also lets her "stew about stuff. For this album, I definitely
wanted to just totally have my own time to myself and not feel obliged
to anything else so I could write [about] some of the stuff that I’d
taken in over the last couple of years."
Sufficiently recharged and with much of what would
become All Of Our Names written, Harmer then had to decide where
to record. She turned to Marty Kinack, her frequent soundman on tour
(and boyfriend), to transform Maison Harmer into a working studio. He
spent a week "soldering cables and figuring out how everything
would work" before recording got underway.
The decision to work at home wasn’t an easy one
for the admittedly undisciplined singer. Musician friends encouraged
her, but Harmer, wary of becoming too comfortable and hence unproductive,
was initially reluctant. "I thought, ‘No, I’ve got to
go somewhere and make it a little bit more like a job.’"
It was a last-minute invitation from the CBC to submit
a song for a series on the seven deadly sins that convinced Harmer that
home recording could be not only a convenient but an efficient process.
(The result, ‘Took It All’, appears on All Of Our Names.)
With less than 48 hours to deliver the track, she and Kinack repaired
to his west end Toronto basement and got to work.
"‘Okay, I’m not getting out of this
seat until I have these lyrics finished’" was Harmer’s
attitude and, to her amazement, they did it. "I was driving out
of Toronto with [the finished tape] in my car going, ‘Yay!’,
really excited. And I thought, ‘Okay, we can do this.’"
But Harmer’s newfound proficiency didn’t
last. "My shed got really clean," Harmer jokes. "I found
lots of things to distract myself. ‘Ah, I’ve got to plant
another tree in the front.’ The road’s been getting really
busy so I’ve been planting all these shrubs, which on limestone
takes about a day to dig a hole. So I found lots of fun stuff to be
distracted by."
So it took a year to finish All Of Our Names
compared to the four or five months spent on You Were Here. "And
that seemed like a long time." Luckily, her record company, Universal,
"pretty much" left her alone to record this album.
"I wanted the record to be a surprise to most
people," Harmer says, "including the record label. Because
I just thought, ‘Well, it kind of worked on my last record.’
"I think my confidence probably has developed,"
she says. "I feel like I can’t ever really lose faith that
I can write a song. Like, sometimes I just won’t have written a
song in a long time and I’ll think, ‘Oh well.’ The minute
I lose my confidence in it what am I gonna do then, right? In the back
of my mind I think I’ve always got to have this thing like ‘yeah,
it’ll be fine, I’ll figure it out.’ Both my parents were
always really, really supportive of me so I think probably I have that
internal ‘I’m going to be okay’ thing."
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