Sarah Jane Scouten, Vancouver album launch party at the Fox Cabaret for new album, When the Bloom Falls From the Rose, Thursday, July 27. Tickets, $10 advance, $20, at the door. Doors: 8 p.m.
Sarah Jane Scouten says the album cover similarities between her new release and the Byrds’ 1968 opus Sweetheart of the Rodeo are no mere coincidence.
That Byrds album is the one where the band largely abandoned the folk leanings of their earlier releases in favour of country music, in the process exposing a whole generation of popular music listeners to the genre.
The Byrds had a little help pulling it all together. Country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons was tapped to lend a hand and helped turn the Bryds’ previous flirtations with country music into a full-blown obsession.
“He sort of seemed to make country music cool for the hippy West Coast,” Scouten explains. “That’s kind of what’s starting to happen again.”
Scouten’s second proper album came out last month.
While When the Bloom Falls From the Rose certainly ups the country music sounds that were already there in her previous releases, it’s by no means stylistically static.
In fact, Scouten rejects the tendency to box music in with strict labels or definitions.
“That’s maybe a modern phenomenon, where we’ve become so preoccupied with genre and subgenre and genre-fusing – it’s just music,” she says.
So what’s with the connection between Scouten’s album cover and the Byrds’ one?
“Contributing to the living evolution of country music,” she says. “We’re trying to kind of do that too, as best we can.”
A lot of the evolution of modern country music involves some experiments both big and small, Scouten says. It’s also based on the notion that country music doesn’t necessarily have to sound like one thing.
On her new 10-track album, her songwriting led her in all different directions and sounds.
The album’s first single, the wild honky-tonk romp “Bang Bang,” certainly sets a tone – one that Scouten says people have been reacting really positively to – but it’s not necessarily indicative of the rest of the album.
Instead, Scouten and her band tried to accurately do justice to the music style or mood they were trying to re-create.
“We approached each song from the traditional style that it sat in,” she explains. “‘Bang Bang’ is very Wanda Jackson-y, rockabilly, and then we went into Daniel Lanois land with ‘Acre of Shells.’”
Scouten currently lives in Toronto but her connection to B.C. is strong.
She was born and raised on Bowen Island and spent many years in Vancouver as well.
She’s now signed with the Vancouver-based music label Light Organ Records, who put out When the Bloom Falls From the Rose.
Scouten says it was at times challenging recording the new album with a larger cast of contributors, compared to her earlier releases which were more individual efforts.
But the result is a much fuller and richer sound that ultimately allowed Scouten to take the songwriting in a more adventurous direction. “It sounds like it cost four times as much,” she jokes.
Scouten’s first album, 2014’s The Cape, dealt with themes such as disenchantment and loss of romance – there’s even a sly nod to Bowen’s Cape Roger Curtis in the album title.
But on this latest effort, her mindset is geared towards reflecting where she is, rather than where she has been.
“For me this record is about maturing as an artist and realizing that it’s like a job – it’s a vocation – but it’s not just a hobby anymore. This is what I do. The other two records just sort of seemed like they fell out of me. This is one was very intentional, it took a lot of work and a lot of people hauling together to get it out. It wasn’t just me this time.”
Scouten is wrapping up a set of tour dates in Canada in August before heading out on a European tour in September.
