Her music was in danger.
For a dozen years in the late 1970s and ’80s Devon Hanley eased between folk ballads and jazz standards in every club, lounge, bar and restaurant around Vancouver.
It was what she’d yearned for almost since the moment her unlined fingers first stretched around the neck of a guitar when she was in fourth grade.
“I just wanted to play,” she says. “That’s all I ever wanted to do.”
Jokingly referring to herself as “a wannabe Joan Baez,” Hanley recalls growing up in the North Shore in the 1960s awash in folk music; “all the Joans and Judies,” she laughs.
“My mom was getting me to all my music lessons and making sure I practised piano and my dad was playing all the music that just totally inspired me,” she recalls, her voice taking on tones of reverence for Simon and Garfunkel, Nana Mouskouri, and Harry Belafonte.
By the time she graduated high school Hanley had studied music for a decade. She considered continuing her studies in university but found herself vibrating like a racehorse stuck in a stall.
“I went off to UBC and did a year of music there and I was bored out of my mind,” she says. “I enrolled in second year . . . got my scholarship money, quit, took the money and bought the piano that I am still playing to this very day. Sneaky, eh?”
She started playing in front of crowds and recording a series of demos on quarter-inch reel to reel tape.
But by the dawn of the 1980s – an era in which Mötley Crüe and Poison menaced both the Top 40 and the ozone layer – Hanley experienced the hardship of being an adherent to acoustic music in an era that was increasingly electric.
“The big bands were Loverboy, Bryan Adams, Denise McCann. It was a rock ’n’ roll town,” she says. “By my early 30s I was getting a little burned out on the nightclub and lounge scene as a mainstay for earning my living.”
She was working six nights a week and feeling like she “crawled out of an ashtray” by the time she headed home each evening and early morning.
“I kind of threw in the towel,” she says. “I look back now and go, ‘God, I should never have stopped. I should never have given up. But I needed another way to make a living. I couldn’t keep playing the bars and lounges.”
For 18 years Hanley handled communications work for a variety of groups including Early Music Vancouver, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and the District of North Vancouver.
“In a sense, my creative side was still being fulfilled,” she says. “I think that’s what sort of saved me.”
But while she might have been saved, all the music she’d recorded was imperilled.
“If you don’t turn it into digital, it turns to dust,” she says.
Determined to save the pop demos and jazz recordings she’d laid down amid sextets, trios and big bands, Hanley reached out to Rolf Hennemann, an engineer and producer who’d worked with Raffi, Heart, Roy Forbes and Terry Jacks.
Over the course of one night at a Burnaby studio, Hanley and Hennemann preserved her old music. They also briefly broached the subject of new music.
If she ever wanted to make an album, Hennemann told her, let me know.
The time wasn’t right – but it would be soon.
Shortly after moving to Powell River, Hanley recalls her husband asking her a question she hadn’t heard in years: “Where are you going with your guitar?”
Despite not performing for about 15 years, Hanley immediately seized the opportunity to play at an outdoor market. More offers followed. She also found herself writing music again, eventually putting together her debut album Nothing But Sky, produced by Hennemann.
She’s recorded two more albums since, including Journey Home, which she released earlier this year.
Now 61, Hanley says her songwriting has evolved, maybe even matured.
“I don’t write songs about needing to fall in love and find my next love,” she says.
Songwriting, she says, is “a window into yourself.”
There’s a song on Journey Home where she copes with the death of her brother. There are songs about confusion and tunes about joy.
And while her music “doesn’t do a thing” for some listeners, Hanley says she’s gathered a “dedicated following” who respond to her gentle lyrics and her mix of folk, country, gospel and bluegrass.
Her Friday night show is set to feature Finn Manniche on cello and Rene Worst on acoustic bass.
Even though she lives two ferry rides away, the North Shore show feels like a local gig, she says.
“Even though it’s changed a great deal . . . part of it still feels like home.”
