Now mid-March, the frigid evenings of last month have melted into above-freezing nights, while daytime highs rise into the 60s and 70s (Fahrenheit). Thumb-thick bees buzz into blooms, baby deer frolic in short and tall grass, and older folks don light coats when trodding with their dogs along the gravel pathways in our development. Spring has sprung.
Some years, of course, the awakening is momentarily snuffed by sudden snow, others by the crushing heat of an early summer, with weather forecasters often predicting the seasonal stops and starts after the fact. It’s not just in retrospect that the demarcations are detected, however; we feel the shifts in our bones.
For music artists, change is generally presented as if it’s a linear thing: album, tour, new project, new tour. A chord leads to a melody and then chorus, with that initial tributary leading to a larger stream and then a river, which in turn empties into the sea. Such words as “growth,” “stagnation” and “disappointment” are tossed about by critics and fans alike while we jet across the waters in our metaphoric boats. We ponder and pontificate, ascribe deep meaning, and delineate the phases of development as if we’re meteorologists dissecting past forecasts. It once was common for new works to appear each year, then every two, and now…they come when they come.
It’s weird, right? Does the muse vanish once an album is done? Does metamorphosis take a breather? In truth, creatively fallow periods are often not as dormant as they appear, with the seasonal changes we observers stamp on them projecting order onto what is an unordered process. Artistic stasis is rarely that. It’s the chrysalis stage, when the subconscious mind consumes and consumes until ideas bubble forth. There’s no rushing it.
In the press release that accompanied Interval_o, her new EP, Portuguese-Canadian singer-songwriter Nico Paulo explains, “I was feeling like I had run out of things to say, but I still want to sing to people. I was wondering, ‘is there a way of doing that? Can I still keep people company with words and sound and not have to tell a full story?’” The result is a five-track, 14-minute set filled with lilting melodies, wordless vocals and fragmented verses that, to me, replicate drifting into or out of a pleasant dream.
The songs, such as they are, came about while performing live music during yoga classes. As a result, as one might suspect, they possess an ethereal quality, with the nominal stops and starts serving as stanza breaks rather than ends and beginnings. Also playing a part, albeit one she wasn’t cognizant of at the time: They were written just before she learned she was pregnant. To again quote from the press release: “If there’s anything that feels sort of like magic, it’s that there was some sort of anticipation or preparation that I was trying to get to while I was writing in that phase. Not just the exercise of it, practicing something mindful and meditative, and taking care of my body physically—but it feels like I was preparing in some way for something bigger.”
The result reminds me of one of my favorite albums, David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name…, with each track flowing into the next as if a zen opera. Paulo handles all vocals and looped vocals, plus contributes an electric guitar loop on one track; her partner, Adam Hogan, strums acoustic guitar on three; Kyle Cunjak plucks the acoustic bass on four; and Joshua Van Tassel, who also produced and engineered, handles the drums, percussion, electronics and ondéa.
(The album can be purchased on Bandcamp.)
The Old Grey Cat 