Basia Bulat’s brave new old world

But few 24-year-old musicians come across as unforced and self-assured as Bulat does on Oh, My Darling. Its songs sound like they could have been around for decades not in a revivalist or throwback sense, but something more fundamental. They simply feel second-nature, like you must’ve known them all your life. That’s rare territory for an artist to reach, especially their first time on record.

Take, for example, “I Was A Daughter”, the disc’s second track. The anchoring guitar strum that opens the song gradually is augmented by other elements minimalist piano accents, an infectiously rhythmic round of handclaps, then Bulat’s richly emotional voice, and finally strings that fully flesh out the song’s melody. By the time the building tension breaks halfway through, with everything but Bulat’s voice and delicate plucks of strings and plinks of piano dropping away, the song has already settled in deep. The quiet pause proves dramatically dynamic, setting things up for one last rush to its conclusion: “We gave away our hearts before we knew what they were,” Bulat sings, then repeats those last three words, three times, her voice reaching ever higher with each pass, the strings and handclaps returning, swirling and soaring to a shimmering crescendo around her. It’s breathtaking, it’s brilliant, and it’s all over in less than three minutes. And I swear this song was somehow in my soul long before I heard it.

That sensation is far from an isolated incident of transcendence on Oh, My Darling. “Snakes And Ladders” and “In The Night” weave similar spells, if more stridently, with full drums replacing handclaps and indelible piano runs reinforcing the melody. On the quieter side, “Little One” recalls the finest of classic English folk-rock, from the beckoning violin solo that opens the track to Bulat’s brooding and beguiling minor-key vocal turn in the chorus. Perhaps the album’s most perfectly captured moment indelible enough that fan-performed versions of the song have started to pop up on YouTube is the opening track, “Before I Knew”, which says all it needs to say in barely over a minute. Ukulele strums and clapping rhythms accompany Bulat as she sings: “The first time I felt my heart/Was the first time I sang out loud, all through the night/But before I knew, I was lost.” A chorus of voices harmonizes with her on the song’s title words, lifting her up from the lyrics of despair. It’s so spare, it’s almost primal, and that’s a big part of Bulat’s charm.

“I definitely do appreciate finding open spaces in the small space, and being able to open up a lot more with a lot less,” Bulat says, when asked about the relative brevity of her songwriting on Oh My Darling; all but two cuts are under four minutes, and a couple clock in at less than a minute and a half. “That’s why I really love Emily Dickinson so much, because she can do in four lines what some people can’t do in a novel.”

That Bulat whose first and last names are pronounced BOSH-uh boo-LOT would reference Dickinson is not too surprising, given that she was studying English literature at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, when Oh, My Darling redirected her future plans. (She’d earned her undergraduate degree and was working on a Master’s; she says she plans to finish eventually, joking that her professors “are willing to take me back as a student whenever my next record flops!”) She made the album in Montreal in 2006 while spending time there learning French as part of her academic studies; former Arcade Fire drummer Howard Bilerman produced it, and helped find the album a home with Rough Trade Records. The U.K.-based label released it overseas in spring 2007; a Canadian release (on Hardwood Records) followed that fall before Rough Trade issued it in the U.S. in early 2008.

Bulat was raised in Toronto (where she recently returned to live), and was well-grounded in music from an early age her mother was a classical piano teacher although she didn’t quite foresee touring the continent and beyond as a singer-songwriter. “I always knew that music was always going to be very important in my life,” she says. “That was something that was perhaps non-negotiable. Music and books those are the two things that I really love the most. So I just always found some way to either play with other people, or sing, or do the radio show on campus and just be around people who appreciate music.”

Growing up, Bulat learned to play piano “when I was really little, I wanted to be a concert pianist,” she recalls and in high school played upright bass as well as flute. That instrumental variety served her well when she started making her own music; not only has she continued to add to her own repertoire (in concert, she plays autoharp as well as acoustic guitar), but she tends to be broad-minded and innovative in terms of writing and arranging.

“I get excited by the fact that there might be something new and fun to play in the room,” she says. “A lot of the instruments, they transfer over, like the guitar, the bass, and the ukulele; they’re not the same, but they have similar principles that apply. And the flute and the saxophone, the fingerings are kind of the same. I don’t think I’m necessarily amazing at anything, but I do feel like I can at least play a song or write a song on almost anything.”

That open-ended instrumental mindset carries over to her live performances. Bulat’s touring lineup frequently features such uncommon components as ukulele and viola in addition to more typical instruments such as piano and drums. Her sound is a far cry from standard two-guitars-bass-drums fare, and all the more intriguing for that. “Those are the instruments I like and wanted not necessarily to be different from anybody,” she explains. “A lot of the music that I listen to sometimes will be just a guitar and a banjo and a ukulele and voices or something. With folk music, it’s not necessarily that unusual, but maybe it’s strange that we don’t have a bass. Sometimes we have a cello with us, and that kind of acts as the bass….Those are sounds that speak to me a little more; somehow it seems like that’s what needs to be there.”

In particular, it’s hard to imagine many of the songs on Oh, My Darling without the string-section support that adds a great deal of grace and depth. “When I was making the record, it was really very much just trying to document what my friends and I were doing at the time with these songs,” she says. “And we did have a string trio basically playing with me at all my shows in London” during her college days.

The string presence has continued to figure heavily in her approach to songwriting, Bulat says, judging from the material she’s written to date for her next record. “With some songs, I know that there can’t be a lot extra there like it’s just autoharp and voice, or guitar and voice, or piano and drums and voice,” she notes. “But I’d say about 70 percent of the songs I write, I’m thinking about how I want the strings to sound not even whether I want them or not, but just, OK, what are they actually going to play. It’s just a given. It’s not like a ‘production’ thing; it’s like, no, this is what has to be there.”

The time for arranging and recording that new material is likely coming soon, seeing as how it’s now been two years since Oh, My Darling was made. “I think I have probably eighteen or nineteen [songs],” she says. “I have a lot. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, and who knows, maybe I’ll write another eighteen more before I even get into the studio.”

There’s also the possibility of putting her own stamp on other writers’ songs. Hints of Bulat’s talents as an interpreter have shown through on a recent 7-inch single featuring a cover of soul legend Sam Cooke’s “Touch The Hem Of His Garment”, as well as on an enchantingly ramshackle reading of the Strokes’ “Someday” which was recorded at a practice several years ago and was posted to her MySpace site earlier this year.

Perhaps her finest cover to date, though, is an autoharp rendition of Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You In The End”, which she has been playing frequently in her live shows for a good while. First covered by Johnston’s fellow Austinites the Reivers way back in 1987 shortly after it had appeared on Johnston’s independent cassette release Retired Boxer the song has gained considerable traction in recent years via versions by Wilco (as a B-side to a late-’90s single) and Beck (on the Johnston tribute album Discovered Covered).

As fate would have it, Bulat’s voice compared at times to Sandy Denny and Natalie Merchant, and creatively described by one writer as being like “demerara,” a light-brown raw sugar often used in making rum in fact is quite closely akin to that of Kathy McCarty, who in 1995 recorded an entire album of Daniel Johnston songs.

To Bulat, “True Love Will Find You” is a standard-in-the-making. “Some songs I just think need to be sung out a lot more,” she suggests. “I was thinking about how so many people were covering each others’ songs in the ’60s and ’70s it was just sort of like, that’s how the song earned its ‘standard’ stripes, was how many people played it. And I definitely think some songs deserve to be standards. I think everybody should know that Daniel Johnston song.”

Bulat has her own personal tale as to how she became aware of Johnston’s music. “I actually met him very briefly,” she relates. “He was opening for Yo La Tengo. It was in Toronto, at this place called the Phoenix; I must have been like 18. And the Phoenix had this little room where there was a pay-phone and they’d sell pizza and stuff. At the time I was just calling my mom to get a ride home, and he [Daniel] was there. And I said something like, ‘That was a good show.’ I was a little bit intimidated, because it’s an artist, and he’s, you know, a big guy, and I was 18. And he said something like, ‘Thanks, can I buy you a slice of pizza?’ It was so strange, like this bizarre, surreal moment: Daniel Johnston offering to buy me a slice of pizza.”

In the end, for Bulat, what she hears in Johnston’s songs is what she’s constantly striving to achieve with her own writing. “What I’m always trying to do is find something that is true to myself,” she says. “Not necessarily a universal truth or anything like that. But I definitely feel like, when you’re listening to him, you know who he is. It’s not a facade. I think the reason why so many people admire him is because of that because you can hear his heart.”

ND.com editor Peter Blackstock bought a copy of Daniel Johnston’s Retired Boxer cassette from Waterloo Records in Austin, Texas, in 1986. It was recorded on bargain-basement-quality tape, and it still plays, two decades later.