Basia Bulat 'Oh My Darling' album

Basia Bulat hails from the forest city of London, Ontario, where she found her songs and stories dangling from the trees. Her debut album Oh, My Darling was engineered and produced by Howard Bilerman (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Arcade Fire, upcoming British Sea Power), and will be released on Rough Trade Records with an unreleased extra track. Basia’s songs are infused with sweet ragtime piano melodies, tender-hearted string arrangements, and a voice that has been compared to Elyse Weinberg and Leslie Feist (she was on the road with The Veils as a background vocalist.) Together with her backing band, Basia has begun bringing her unique blend of folk and chamber pop to audiences across Canada.

She will do a NY showcase at Joe’s Pub January 10 and will tour extensively beginning early February. “Little Waltz” is currently being used in an Australian VW commercial.

There will be a video for the single “In the Night.”

press quotes
Using the most straightforward descriptors - jazz-inflected, orchestral folk pop with a dash of northern soul - make [Bulat’s music] sound more conventional than I'd like so instead, I'll try this. Basia Bulat sounds like springtime smiling. Her music is rich yet breezy, with a melodic enthusiasm that's nothing short of delightful.
- Frank Yang, Chromewaves

A pint-sized spitfire with cornsilk hair who could play the younger sister of Dawson's Creek's Michelle Williams, with charisma to burn...The best part of Bulat's set was her remarkable, throaty voice. The singer's almost viscous, full-bodied vocals shifted to suit her disparate songs.
-Sarah Liss, Now Toronto Magazine

It's hard to pinpoint what makes her music so wonderful. Her Joni Mitchell-influenced folk songs have an elegant grace to them... Her band does a lovely job making the songs complete, delicately adding strings, piano and percussion to put everything together.
- Mike Warner, The Torontoist

biography
“I don’t think I realised the radio had more than one station til I was 11 or 12,” Basia Bulat says. At the family home in Toronto, the dial was always fixed to the local oldies station: Motown, Stax, The Beatles, Beach Boys and Sam Cooke. While her mother hunted for someone to do the dishes, Basia and her younger brother Bobby would hide with a radio or tape player, happily rattled by all that song.

Since the age of three, Basia has been sitting on piano stools and trying to hammer things out. It started with her piano-teacher mum, but along the way Basia’s picked up guitar, autoharp, banjo, ukelele, sax and flute. In high-school her instrument was the upright bass – a lone girl among “eight-foot-tall guys, goofing off with the tubas”. There’s a sense of play that still suffuses her music, jostling under the songs of regret and love, want and joy. When her brother began in his teens to play drums with punk bands, Basia would be there with her demerara voice, joining happily in the jam. When she left for university in London, Ontario, musicians began to drop by her downtown apartment. Many nights were spent with these classically-trained friends, laughing and singing, and together they made a glad, bright noise.

For the summer of 2006, Basia went to live in Montreal. Through friends she met Howard Bilerman, an engineer and co-owner of the famed Hotel 2 Tango studio. Basia cashed some student loans to record with Bilerman in one of the final sessions at the original H2T site, but by the third day she had lost her voice. It was ultimately these rough early takes, hoarse with excitement, that formed the bulk of Oh My Darling. Initially the recordings were meant only as an “audible memory” of the time Basia spent with friends in London and Montreal: ”We liked playing together so much, and I just wanted to remember that.” But Bilerman was smitten with the songs, with Basia and her band, and he began to write to friends at labels, friends with music-blogs, anyone who might pay attention. For despite the original intention, these tracks are breathless, thirsty, dislodged from dreary nostalgia. There are strings, yes, and acoustic guitar, but also a frantic drum-kit gallop; the influence of the spirits of wild Jeff Magnum, big-voiced Odetta, Emily Dickinson and all those boisterous soul-music singles. It’s this spark that sets Basia Bulat apart from the raft of typical singer-songwriters, and also what attracted the interest of Geoff Travis and Britain’s legendary Rough Trade label – who released Oh My Darling in Europe and Japan in the spring of 2007.

by Sean Michaels

Do you also would like to share your opinion? If so, please register or login here.

Tags

Details

Popular Songs

New Songs

Basia Bulat - Oh My Darling