Maia Davies

A Song in the RIver

As one quarter of the country-rock band Ladies of the Canyon, Maia Davies is busy promoting Haunted Woman, the first full-length album from the group. In conversation recently, the musician and songwriter shed light on the sequence of events that led to the making of the twelve-song collection.

Ladies of the Canyon formed in Montréal, which Davies calls her hometown. The other three band members came to the city from disparate parts of Canada, specifically Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and northern Ontario. A formal partnership evolved out of simple friendship, just four women writing and playing music together in their living rooms. Along with Davies, who handles guitar, mandolin and keyboard, the group features bassist Anna Ruddick and guitarists Senja Sargeant and Jasmine Bleile. On the songwriting front, Haunted Woman includes at least one song written by each band member on an individual basis, and there are several co-writes. Each contributes vocal work, notably Sargeant, who takes the lead on ‘Follow Me Down’, the infectious first single from the album.



Released early in June 2010, Haunted Woman is a polished effort, slickly produced by Colin Cripps, well known for overseeing albums previously for the likes of Kathleen Edwards and Jim Cuddy. It took a deft touch to harness the artistic potential and musical flexibility inherent in Ladies of the Canyon. Cripps met the challenge head on, skillfully piecing together the individual talents of the band members to form an impressive whole. Lush, soaring harmonies abound, especially on the accusatory, whisky-drenched ‘Forget Me’ and the old country foot-stomper ‘No Deliverance’, which summons up the twang of the best of Dolly Parton. Another highlight is the subtle, delicate closing number ‘Goodbye Gold and Blue’. Written by Davies, who is only in her late twenties, the track is a sweet meditation on the loneliness that sets in while waiting for lost love to return: ‘Don’t keep my heart in waiting, the day is long and the churches are bare / but in the meantime, in the field by the burrow there’s a song in the river’.

In the following interview, Maia Davies reveals the origins of some of her songs. As she talks about lyrics inspired by dreams, poems and novels, it becomes clear that her compositions come from a wide range of experiences. Davies also explains the intriguing photography on the cover of Haunted Woman, noting that there is an element of fantasy to it. She drops a few hints divulging how her aesthetic sensibilities and tastes mesh with those of her collaborators, and she discusses at length the ways in which her songwriting has been informed by her desire to understand the impulses that make up the essence of gospel and spiritual music.

Ladies of the Canyon will be on stage throughout July and August with several dates in Quebec and Ontario, including a stop at the Ottawa Folk Festival and a high-profile gig opening for Great Big Sea at the Molson Amphitheatre on August 20th. What should concertgoers expect? “Expect the unexpected, I would say!” laughs Davies, before turning slightly more serious. “We’re just here to present our songs. That’s our first goal: present our record and introduce ourselves. I’m pretty sure that we’re friendly and approachable, and we’re also a little – some have said – crazy and eccentric and eclectic. We definitely do our own thing. We’re not afraid to speak our minds and kid around a lot on stage.”

CI: Let me start with what I am most curious about, just the album jacket and the photo on the cover. The photo was taken by Matt Barnes and features the four band members dressed like country gypsies maybe – at least that was the feeling I got – and sitting and standing in a rather decadent interior space. What was the thought process behind that imagery for the cover?

MD: Oh, I think it has a lot to do with sort of wanting to create this rock n’ roll mansion where we all wish that we could live, and just sit around in cool clothes all day, play music and jam and drink champagne! So it was a fantasy come true for us: that’s what we wanted on the cover.

 

CI: On the album, as far as songwriting duties go, the four of you really spread the job around. When it came to deciding which songs would go on the album, I assume that you all had a few to throw into the mix. How did that process work? It must be difficult to wade through a lot of songs from different writers and figure out which songs make it.

MD: For sure. We’re all really prolific writers, too. We had something like thirty songs to pick from! But I don’t know; it didn’t end up being so difficult to make the choices. We chose a lot of the songs that just went well together because we have a lot of songs and we are sort of prolific. They don’t always come out in a very cohesive genre, so we picked a lot of songs that went well together and were in the same vein. We tried to balance it out between songwriters, but we didn’t really worry about it too much. We just picked the songs that we felt were best suited to our coming out into the world.

CI: One of the songs that you wrote, ‘No Deliverance’, really has an old country feel to it. From what I understand, you wrote that from a series of images that you saw in a dream. That made me wonder about your approach to songwriting: do you always have a pen and paper on the bedside table, or was that a rare occasion when a song came to you that way?

MD: Well, I’ve always had a pen and paper beside the bed, but now I’ve switched over to my iPhone digital recorder on the bedside table! I’m always recording ideas and writing stuff down. It’s not the first time that I’ve written from dreams. I have very vivid and sort of strange dreams, and I decided that it would be good inspiration to incorporate some of that into songwriting. I’ll have ideas that are so extraordinary by the simple fact that they come from my subconscious. Dreams are always wild, so I try to use that a lot.

CI: Now the title track, ‘Haunted Woman’, is also one of your pieces. That first line, ‘Oh Haunted Woman, kingdom under your eye’, really sets the foundation for the whole song. It struck me that the song has a bit of a gospel tinge to it. I’m not sure if I’m right on that, but it feels like there is a gospel touch to the country sound. What were the origins of that song, and what led to the decision to title the album after that one?

MD: It’s funny that you say the gospel thing because I had originally written the first version – that nobody has ever heard – as an a cappella country-gospel number. Then I turned it into more of a folk number. The whole song happened while I was at Jasmine’s – my bandmate – at her farm where she grew up, with her parents. They’re big music lovers. Her dad showed me a bunch of old tunes that I didn’t know. He really introduced me to John Prine one weekend, really in-depth. He didn’t introduce him to me by playing stuff on the record player, but rather by playing the songs directly for me, picking up the guitar and singing them to me and teaching them to me. I was really inspired by a lot of John Prine songs when I was writing ‘Haunted Woman’. I wanted to write something that had a great heartfelt old-time storytelling vibe to it.

When we were trying to title the album, we really had a hard time, to be honest. It was really hard to find one lyric, or even an outside title, or a song title that rang through for all of us especially, something that fit the music and we could agree on. At some point, I forget who it was, but someone said, ‘I don’t know if this has been suggested before, but what about Haunted Woman?’ And everybody sort of went, ‘oh right, how come we didn’t think of that? That’s perfect!’ So we went with that.

CI: On the closing track of the record, ‘Goodbye Gold and Blue’, there is an interesting line – ‘Don’t keep my heart in waiting, the day is long and the churches are bare’. That song is rather sad and melancholy, and I thought there was a real loneliness there. Just with the line about the churches – is there a spiritual push to some of your songwriting? As you mentioned, ‘Haunted Woman’ began as a gospel song.

MD: I think that, because I didn’t grow up in a very spiritual home at all, it wasn’t something that I really learned about. I’m someone who is very thirsty for knowledge. That’s how I’ve lived my whole life journey: just trying to find out about stuff that I don’t know. It’s just because I didn’t really have any knowledge of religion and spirituality, and all the music that went with that, so I was fascinated once I got a little taste of it in my early adult life. I became fascinated, and for many years almost fixated on those kinds of things. I think that definitely did come out in a lot of these songs.

CI: Also I understand that, on that particular song, ‘Goodbye Gold and Blue’, you were on your own when you were writing it and taking in a bit of poetry, including some Langston Hughes. I read a bit of Langston Hughes when I was in school, and I always thought he had an interesting meter to his work. Do you find yourself constantly going back to music and also to poetry and novels to stimulate your imagination?

MD: I read a lot of poetry and novels, and write stories based on an event in a book or a character. I just wrote a new song where I’m writing a whole story just on the image of the cover of a Fleetwood Mac record that I really thought was interesting! … I go to museums a lot with a pen and paper and just write on a book, really. I write a poem for every painting that I see that moves me, and later on I’ll maybe use some of those words, or even a whole piece, in a song that I’m writing. And I write short stories and poetry. It’s all intertwined for me. …

CI: In the press materials attached to the album, there is mention of The Eagles, The Band, and Fleetwood Mac, obviously that sixties and seventies influence. What are you listening to now that seems to be at the front of your mind, music that you find yourself really attracted to?

MD: Recently I’m pretty obsessed with an older Daniel Lanois record that I can’t get enough of, The Beauty of Wynonna. That’s really dominating my play list these days. I’ve also got pretty into a couple of songs by Miranda Lambert. As far as contemporary country goes, she’s impressed me a lot with her writing. My taste is so eclectic. It’s all over the place. I’m listening to the Black Keys, and an old John Lee Hooker album; just constantly trying to discover new music that will move me.

CI: Now we get the understanding of the four of you in the band coming together as friends and the group just sort of evolving, but looking a little closer, you have Colin Cripps on as the producer, and Luke Doucet and Kathleen Edwards playing on the album. How did it start rolling for you to get all this prominent talent to help push the first album along?

MD: That really all started to happen from meeting Colin, who was introduced to us by our manager. We were in need of a producer. We wanted to make a record and had all these songs ready to go, but we didn’t know a whole lot of people who were record producers, especially in the style of music that we were attempting to do. It was a pretty ambitious thing to want to do a mostly live-off-the-floor record. …

We were introduced to many different producers and asked to make a choice. They were great, all of them, but when we met Colin, there was a special affinity that we felt for him. We sort of instantly became friends. He had such a great background and understanding of the type of music that we were specifically trying to put out there. He also happens to be just about the nicest guy around in the country! So he was really great at introducing us to different people, and playing the record for all of his friends. He’s certainly very well established, and given his endorsement, all these people have been willing to participate in our project. I feel blown away by that, and so thankful!

Date of Interview: 06/30/2010
Location: On the phone from Toronto, ON
Link: www.ladiesofthecanyon.com