In 2014, in a weekly roundup of releases that had made a big impression, I highlighted the song Solace from Myriam Gendron‘s debut album, Not So Deep As A Well. I included a quote from the label manager at the time, which read:
It’s not too often that I’ve been blindsided by an artist. In nearly three years of running Mama Bird, no album that’s been sent to me unsolicited has floored me so unexpectedly. Myriam Gendron’s ‘Not So Deep as a Well’ is a stunning piece of work. It’s strange, mysterious, heartbreaking, and deeply clever. Myriam’s composition and performance of Dorothy Parker’s poetry is a revelation that truly brings out all of Parker’s power as a writer – the wit, the bite, and all the lonesome heartache becomes so heavy and so clear.
While this was something of a sleeper hit upon release, this musical gem is to be reissued as an expanded edition on Vinyl and CD and will be available in Europe for the first time via Basin Rock.
Once you hear Gendron, you don’t forget her (tracks from her later 2021 album, Ma délire – Songs of love, lost & found, have also featured in a number of our mixes – listen to KLOF 13). Most recently, she toured with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy following the release of his latest life-affirming album, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You, and she also performed alongside Bridget St John at Public Records in Brooklyn, NY, last month.
Basin Rock’s reissue is an expanded edition of her debut which will be released on 17th November (Digital/CD/180 gram Black Vinyl).
Basin Rock: Equal parts soft and sorrowful, Myriam Gendron’s stunning debut album, unintentional both in its recording and release, shone a warm lamp-light glow upon a curious and captivating new voice in the Québécois folk world.
Nearly ten years on from its release in her native Canada and America, Not So Deep As A Well gets a European release for the first time this autumn, with a new pressing on the Basin Rock label (Julie Byrne, Aoife Nessa Frances, Trevor Beales, Juni Habel) which features two tracks not included on the original release ‘Bric-à-brac’ and ‘The Small Hours’, both written in the early days of 2014.
Recorded alone in her apartment, with no knowledge of sound engineering, it could almost be a lost artefact, a dust-lined document of a forgotten time and place. Taking the poems of Dorothy Parker, whose work Gendron stumbled upon by chance in a Montreal bookstore, she imbues the words with a graceful, gentle expression, a lingering sense of sorrow always present, always casting a spell.
“I came across a beautiful 1936 anthology of her poetry, and I was attracted by the pink clothed cover and the gold lettering,” Myriam explains of that introduction. “I knew the name but in my mind she was a satirist. I had no idea she had written poetry.”
A stark, spellbinding collection, Not So Deep As A Well, is raw and unyielding in so many ways we no longer expect to hear. As if sitting in the room with her, Gendron’s voice is cracked and unadorned, quietly forced into a push and pull between the quietude of the songs and the noisy world outside her apartment.
“I discovered a whole other side of Dorothy Parker, and it probably helped me to understand myself a little better,” Gendron says, reflecting on the inspiration behind her debut album. “Her infinite sadness really resonated in me, and I think channelling all that emotion made me grow as an artist and as a person.” In so many ways, Not So Deep As A Well places Gendron on an equally compelling footing, creating a language all of her own; as beguiling as that which inspired it.
Listen to a new track, Bric-á-brac, included on the new expanded version and also our Song of the Day:
Order the Expanded Version here (17th November – CD/180-gram Black Vinyl): Bandcamp | Basin Rock