Lost and found
Dave Jaffer
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Great Lake Swimmers: Something bigger than the song
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Great Lake Swimmers discover that an album is worth a Thousand Islands
Sadly, Great Lake Swimmers' Tony Dekker shares no blood with Desmond Dekker. "Unfortunately there's no relation," he says, laughing. "But that would be great."Of course this matters very little. What matters more is that the Toronto-based band for which he serves as architect, guitarist and lead singer just released their fourth album, a winning effort whose unorthodox recording locales tell but half the story. Recorded in and around the Thousand Islands at places including Singer Castle on Dark Island - which was built based on the description of a property in Sir Walter Scott's novel Woodstock - Lost Channels is a beautiful little record that's been talked up a lot in Polaris Prize circles.
"It'd be an honour to be nominated for sure," says Dekker. Of the various locales, he explains that the band "had an invitation to be out there, and be inspired [by] and explore the region," and smartly took it. This, he says, made the record about way more than just the record.
"You get a sense that you're tying into something bigger than just the song," he explains of the experience. "You're also kind of documenting a place, and I think it allows for there to be more reverence for the creative process - making these songs and recording them to tape.
"There's something more special about it, to me, that we made this great effort to turn these spaces into our recording studio, temporarily, really just documenting the sounds of a place."
For the uninitiated, Lost Channels is,
on one hand, bright and shimmery (say, She Comes to Me in Dreams), and on the other soft, delicate and pained (say, Stealing Tomorrow). It's the kind of folk music that's made a lot of friends in this country lately: articulate, passionate stuff that pays respect to traditional forms and instrumentation but doesn't (snobbily?) sacrifice accessibility. Some compare the Swimmers to Seattle's Fleet Foxes, but in truth the comparison might better be structured as going the opposite way. Regardless of comparisons, though, Dekker's viewpoint is that the new material may just represent a watershed moment."I'm really proud of [the album], and I'm proud of all the work that went into it," he says. "It's sort of like a step up for us, and it's an extension of a lot of ideas in a lot of ways, as far as the songwriting's concerned, thematically and technically."
Great Lake Swimmers
w/ Timbre Timbre
At Théâtre Plaza (6505 St-Hubert), June 20
