PLEASURES
in which the writer goes on and on and on about shwingy events she's attended.o

Winter 07:

Big fat new pleasure that I have to reveal to the world:

Sara Dell -- poet, composer, singer, pianist, wielder of keys and eyes (and maybe some kinda distant rel of mine, I feel in my DNA...)

Heard this artist in a small club in Toronto where serious music fetishists have chronically high expectations.

 Wow.  [To get to the point.  With unusual brevity.]

First of all, you gotta give big props to starting life in the olympic endurance event known as the Canadian Prairies.  Where you gotta be smart just to stay warm.

Going to lessons and gigs when it's minus 40 is something I enjoyed all I could stand of—and therefore admire deeply.  Everyone's first instrument is a block heater.  Everyone's genre is determination.

So then Sara Dell takes up piano and voice and uses this like a stethoscope to let us listen to her heart.   [Was that cheesy?  Hope not, it was stupidly sincere.]

She's first a poet.   Lyrics luminous with intelligence.  So when she sings the poems, and the voice is something way more than a useful medium, it's just yummy.

You feel like you're at her party and she's just sat down to chat and shoot the shit with her pals about realistically messy ideas.  Unaffected patter, easy rapport, thinking out loud. 

My music-nerd observations:  no cliches, great changes, crafty accompaniments, interesting voicing.  All fresh and elegant a la meme fois, as they don't say in Winnipeg.  (Where she's from.)

It was magnetic listening to my imagined, way-distant cousin.  Made me think of my soulful witty Irish grandfather {Dell} arriving in Winnipeg with his cello and goin out to freeze his F-holes off and make a delicious life.  She sounds like she's made of the same stuff.

The term Indie was made for Sara Dell.  If you can genre-ize her work, listen here
and knock yourself out.

She photographs dewy and dreamy, and registers incisive p.o.v. in every word.

Photos from here

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