Work in process.
The demo tracks feature Allison Outhit - music & lyrics, vocals, piano, guitars
with Don Kerr on drums and Chris Banks on electric and upright bass.
Shortly, I will be recording a proper album. Don is engineering and producing the whole mess.
More friends will join me as I add songs & tracks. Budget permitting, there will be flugelhorns and violincellos and such.
Influences
So many! Cole Porter, Carole King, Billy Strayhorn, Jim Guthrie, The Poppy Family, ELO, OMD, Ozark Mountain Daredevils, The Buzzcocks, Talk Talk, Killing Joke, Emmylou Harris, The Cure, Prefab Sprout, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Tears for Fears, The Clash, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Replacements, Change of Heart, Throwing Muses, Cocteau Twins, Nirvana, The Pixies, Sufjan Stevens, Bob Marley, Go-Betweens, Kurt Weill, Dirty Three, Keith Jarrett, Gang of Four, Prince, Tortoise, Wooden Stars, Bjork, Super Friendz, Rufus Wainwright, Flaming Lips, Joni Mitchell, Buffalo Tom, the Beatles, Husker Du, Kate Bush, Elvis Costello, Kraftwerk, George Gershwin, Radiohead, Spoon, Rogue Wave, Jane Siberry, Siouxsie, Butthole Surfers, Prince, the Inbreds, Rhys Chatham, I could go on... How much time do we have?
I have been making up songs since I was a toddler. I started playing in bands in 1977. I was thirteen. I played piano and sang backup in the faculty band of my junior high school. It being the 70s, I was pretty into big, smooth, overproduced pop music like Fleetwood Mac and Queen and even, for heaven's sake, Genesis. The Peter Gabriel version, of course.
A couple years later, I got into punk. I played in an all girl punk band that had a boy drummer. (That was Mike Belitsky, by the way. You know him from The Sadies.) At eighteen, I and three other misfit chums formed a synth-pop band in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. We were called Staja-Tanz, if you can believe it, and we were quite popular in an earnest new wave way.
Throughout the 1980s, I played in this band and that, never feeling myself particular restrained by genre or "scene". By this time I had begun playing only guitar - being a Replacements and Pixies fan knocked the keyboards right out of me. In the early 90s, I got really into a lot of the so-called "grunge" bands, but the one I played in was more of a blistering swamp-punk outfit. We were called Bubaiskull, and we used to pack the local watering hole for shows that were often horribly drunken and disorderly, but still emotionally ferocious. I miss those days.
In 1994 I started a trio called Rebecca West with my friends Dale Hussey and Lukas Pearse. We released a couple of CDs and toured Canada a few times. I think people liked us, but as these things go, we never got lucky. Eventually I got very tired of doing three or four jobs at once, so we disbanded. (In those days I was raising my son and working full time and trying to be a rock star. It was a lot.)
Once Rebecca West was finished, I took it easy for a while. A long while. In fact, for the better part of ten years, I was just sort of fooling around, musically speaking, in the comfort of my own home. I wrote maybe one good song per year. Nobody heard them.
I moved to Toronto two years ago and find myself in a fairly musically-heavy environment again. I'm delighted to say that being around so much great music has inspired me to make a big old pop record. I've sort of come full circle - back to my teen years - to when I loved big pop music because I had not an iota of cynicism in me.
Now that I'm well into my forties, I couldn't care less about who's in and what's cool. And what a relief that is! Now I can play what I like, and it turns out, what I like is kind of pretty and hooky and maybe a bit spooky but only because it's hard to get half-way through your life and not bring a few ghosts along.
I hope you like it.
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