Number 8 of 2005 — Emm Gryner: The Great Lakes

There’s a lot of good Canadian music. There’s also a lot of bad Canadian music, as the Much Music Video Awards proved. If you don’t like your singers to wear tea cosies, then perhaps Emm’s your bag.

Apart from a short-lived dalliance with a major label, resulting in her second album, Public, all of Emm Gryner’s albums have been released on her own label, Dead Daisy Records. The Great Lakes is her eighth album. A limited edition homemade album, now out of print, “written, recorded, mixed, printed, hand-stamped, stapled, embossed, cut, burned and packaged especially for you by me”. Mine’s number 30. It’s so homemade that the lyrics to four tracks are missing. Instead, two blank pages. Whoops!

Recorded mostly in Montreal, this album makes my year-end list, because it’s simply a great collection of songs. It epitomises Emm’s musical philosophy, in which music is a way of expressing one’s self – something that needs to be done – rather than a means of making money. Nothing says this better than the first track, Crystal Falls, a ballad, if you like, accompanied by just an electric piano.

Case of Tornadoes begins a general pattern of loud song / quiet song, and this song harks back to the days of Public. The lyrics “I got a case of tornadoes / When you come around / Everything that matters goes underground” thematically reminds me of Tori Amos’ The Power of Orange Knickers.

But it’s not until the fourth track, Billy Hang On, that something magical happens. This, too, is a piano ballad. And it proves, undeniably, that if you’re a great songwriter, you need nothing more. No fancy effects or auto-tuned vocals. Nor an orchestra of millions. One day, I’m hoping that Emm releases an album of just piano tracks. But then, I’m hoping the same for Tori, too.

You see.. there’s another track that does the same: Star/Crossed, piano and the exquisite singing of exquisite poetry. It kills me every time I hear it. And I’m aching to hear the version of this song on her forthcoming album The Summer of High Hopes.

And there’s more, or rather, less. Emm, like Kristin Hersh, can do short tracks. Ex-Boy, all 65 seconds of it is also piano-led. One verse. One chorus. By this time, you’ll have probably noticed that I’ve ignored the more jaunty, electrified tracks in this review. Those too are good songs, but they pale in comparison to the more minimal ones. Win The West, however, is worthy of mentioning. A countrified, poetrified song which is several decibels quieter than the heavy metal anthem it could have been. Thankfully.

And Bulletstorms finishes the album, and the remarkable set of piano ballads on this album:

“You lost Vancouver / Bulletstorms ago / In a war of mistakes / And flying high / Your severed symphonies / Floating on the sea / With ferryboats / Of restless girls like me”

You need Emm in your life. Really you do.