Julie Doiron Has The Midas Touch

03/23/09 11:58am

by Scott Bryson (CHARTattack)

No diaries or tell-all biographies are needed to examine the inner-workings of Julie Doiron's life. Indie rock's favourite folk songstress has already revealed all her deepest secrets quite blatantly over the last 15 years across more than a dozen records as a solo artist and group member.

Through her music, we've watched Doiron struggle with an angst-filled youth, suffer through heartbreak and the ends of relationships, deal with life on the road, raising her children, and finally find renewal after gaining maturity and perspective in her world.

Doiron's latest full-length, I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day, shows a side of Doiron that has rarely emerged over the course of her career. For the first in a long time, Doiron's music can be held up as indisputable evidence that she's happy.

"I'm much happier than I was for a long time, it's true," she says from her home in Sackville, New Brunswick. "And in the past, I don't think I was feeling inclined to write happy songs anyway because it wasn't something I was interested in doing. When I was happy, I was just doing other stuff, and when I was sad, I would write songs.

"These ones came out more naturally. I'd be walking home from somewhere and I'd just start singing because it was a beautiful day...

"There wasn't a lot of sitting down and trying to write a song; they were all just coming out. I'm not as prolific as I was in the past, but I think it's coming back. It comes in waves. Months will go by with nothing, and then suddenly three or four [songs] will come out of nowhere."

Doiron knows a thing or two about coming out of nowhere. Her first band, the now-seminal punk-pop act Eric's Trip, beat the odds and emerged semi-famously from Moncton, N.B. Doiron (working out of Sackville, N.B., a town with only one intersection) later watched herself transform into a modern-day, Canadian Marianne Faithfull as a solo musician — a veritable legend of indie music.

Everything Doiron touches turns to music-nerd gold these days. In 2006, she joined quirky pop outfit Shotgun & Jaybird and helped them release two discs on her Sappy Records imprint, the latter of which, Trying To Get Somewhere, was a hit on campus radio charts.

After that band's untimely demise, she recorded a folk collaboration with Washington's Mount Eerie, and formed a new duo with Shotgun & Jaybird's Fred Squire (a.k.a. Dick Morello) called Calm Down It's Monday. Their upcoming debut album will no doubt soar up the charts as well.

It would be next to impossible for Doiron to pull off regular solo albums with this kind of schedule, were it not for the fact that all the facets of her musical life are intimately connected.

Rick White, Doiron's former Eric's Trip bandmate and long-time collaborator, produced I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day. Squire played on the album and is also directly responsible for several of its songs (or parts of songs). Two tracks from Trying To Get Somewhere are re-imagined on I Can Wonder, and two of the record's other cuts are Squire originals. One, "Spill Yer Lungs," is a Shotgun & Jaybird staple from their early days.

"The two songs that I wrote for the Shotgun & Jaybird album — I had written them basically the day we recorded them," Doiron says. "I thought that was great and it was nice to have them on that album, but then the band broke up so shortly after the record came out.

"The record is out of print now, and I just thought they were good songs and I kind of wanted people to hear them [other than on] the 1,000 copies we made. So, that was the motivation behind that; I just felt that those songs deserved a second life... I still felt pretty attached to them.

"The reason I did two Fred songs is because I think that all of his songs are really beautiful and I don't feel like enough people have heard them... This is the first time I've ever covered someone's songs on a record, so I think that's pretty exciting, too.

"And I just love playing those songs live. I started doing it back a little while ago, when I was in France doing a solo tour, and I just thought they were really nice, so I kind of almost made them mine. I was wishing they were mine, so I guess that's why I recorded them."

Doiron barely resembles the quiet chanteuse who recorded her debut under the name Broken Girl. The majority of I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day's tracks are confident excursions in rock 'n' roll. While it's true Doiron is content, she's quick to point out that happiness will never completely alter the way she makes music.

"I'm not going to start making party albums... probably. I just want to show my appreciation to everyone around me."