It’s hard to separate a work of art from the circumstances that inspired its creation, and the circumstances that have so profoundly impacted the world of the artist who created in. Monarch Girl is a title and a collection of music that was very much inspired and encouraged by Dave Dunlop’s number one fan, his soul mate, and lifelong love – his wife Deanne.
Structured in two very distinct components, the album features 12 songs (plus a bonus track), six for each side if it was vinyl, and each side representing a different tone and tenor and representation of Dunlop’s musical mastery on the guitar, as well has his strength, depth and versatility as a singer/songwriter.
Monarch Girl was released on Oct. 18 through Maple Music, but the tracking had been completed a number of months earlier in the spring of 2016. Many of the songs had a pedigree going back many more months – even years. But there is a remarkable, quite tragic but still beautiful prescience and serendipity to the emotional tone and lyrics of many of the songs. That’s because, even though they were recorded and in the can already, the release of the album came not long after Deanne died from a very sudden illness. So, in essence, and in reality, Monarch Girl stands as a loving, heartfelt, and emotionally potent tribute by Dunlop to his beloved.
And it must be said that Monarch Girl was not really a term which Dunlop had ever previously used as a nickname for Deanne, but upon dreaming up the moniker found it genuinely encompasses who she was as an individual and as a partner.
“It wasn’t her pet name until I was writing the song about her back around April and at the time I didn’t have a title. I had never called her that before but one day when I think I was on the bike or running or something, the term just came into my mind and it wouldn’t leave. It was a pretty cool sounding thing. I already had the lyrics all set to the song and Monarch Girl was the last bit to come. It really came from nowhere but really stuck and it had a nice ring to it and tied in nicely with the artwork for the record. And I really do think it represents her,” said Dunlop, who is the long-time musical partner and collaborator of legendary former Triumph guitarist Rik Emmett, as well as being a member of the popular Jeans ‘n Classics concert series, among many other projects.
“And it’s an interesting thing: the optics might be weird for some people because it seems as though the album was created as a tribute to her after she passed away. But the album was done and ready to go before she got sick. So I just delayed it for a few months because of what was going on. But if you look at the lyrics, they have an even greater resonance now but, really, she was always my muse for all these songs. I am not really a storyteller type of lyricist. I am more about writing what I know. So it’s absolutely in every single way a tribute to her, for her and about her. There’s just no two ways around it. And she was my biggest fan. It’s a very surreal thing on that end too and it’s very surreal for a lot of our close friends and family when they see the record and hear the record because it’s kind of eerie how the songs all seem to be about her.
“There is a song called ‘Til We Die and part of the lyric is ‘together, for better for worse, together, ‘til we die.’ And that was in April or so and recorded that as the last tune on the album and she got sick about a month later.”
The song Broken Hearts, Beautiful Things, again has an almost unbearable sense of poignancy when listened to in light of Deanne’s death.
“Believe it or not, that’s one of the songs that I wrote and recorded, or at least recorded the bulk of the piano and vocal, literally seven years ago. At the time the ‘broken hearts, beautiful things’ concept was still pertaining to Deanne, but it was about other things that were going on in our life, but still heavily related to our relationship. So again, it could easily seem as if it was written just a month ago. And even the song Darkness and Sunshine, or When The Heavy Comes Down – they all relate to her loss, even though that wasn’t the context in which they were written. I honestly don’t know how things work, I don’t pretend to believe or not believe but it sure seems bizarre and it sure seems something was at work here. There’s definitely way more depth to the context and meaning of this record now and to the whole situation. All I can say is that it’s very strange how things worked out,” Dunlop said.
Aside from the evocative nature of the music, which would still be there regardless of the subsequent tragic consequences, Monarch Girl was an opportunity for Dunlop to showcase his talents as a musician, songwriter and vocalist.
“It’s very eclectic record. I am not really beholden to any record label, so I just decided to do the stuff that people know me for. So that’s part pop-rock with vocals and part acoustic finger-style like they see me do with Rik [Emmett]. And it’s in two parts, essentially. If it was vinyl it would be one style on side one and the other on side two,” he said, adding that Emmett has wanted him to do a solo record for a number of years.
“I have been bugging him for two years because I felt that he had one more really great rock record in him and he was a little hesitant and I am glad that it’s finally happened with RES 9 [see our recent interview with Rik: http://www.musiclifemagazine.net/rik-emmett-a-conversation-about-his-new-label-new-album-and-some-old-friends/] And in turn he was bugging me about doing something on my own for a long time, so it’s funny how that works.”
Dunlop has his own recording studio, Room 9, for a number of years, and has recorded six albums with Emmett, as well as with his former band The Full Nine, so he is no stranger to the recording, engineering and production process. But putting something out under his own name is still a concept he’s trying to wrap his head around.
“It’s exciting and it’s daunting in a way. I am used to being part of a collective when releasing records, whether it’s with my own band or with Rik, so this is definitely a different animal for sure, but it’s fun. Ever since I set up my own studio in my basement, I am always writing and always recording and some stuff goes to other artists and some stays with me. So it’s been building for a few years. I do a number of my own gigs where I play classic rock with orchestras [Jeans ‘n Classics] and people keep asking me why I don’t have my own CDs to sell at the merch table. And one day I was thinking, ‘yeah, why don’t I?’ But I have always been busy doing other stuff and I never saw myself really as a solo artist. I liked being part of a team,” he said.
“But I had all these tunes and I was getting pretty confident as a singer these last few years playing with Rik and singing some of my own tunes on our shows and I thought, ‘ah, let’s just go for it.’ Once I decided that I was going to do it I gave myself a hard deadline, so that got me into the studio 12 hours a day just to hammer it home. I compiled I would say 70 per cent of the record from stuff that I had already written over the last couple of years and then I wrote another three or four songs and that all happened in February, March and into April.”
Emmett took a solo turn on one of the tracks on the album while other members of Emmett’s current band, including bassist Steve Skingley and drummer Paul DeLong (formerly of Kim Mitchell’s band) also appear. Some other special guests include former Emmett solo band drummer, the now-Los Angeles-based Randy Cooke, as well as former Pat Metheny Band vocalist David Blamires. Jeans ‘N Classics vocalists Kathryn Rose and Rique Franks also appear.
The relationship with Emmett grew out of both them being former students in the music program at Toronto’s Humber College.
“In 1995 I was teaching on the faculty of the National Summer Guitar Workshop at Humber and he came in as a sort of clinician for one day. At the end of the week the clinicians got to play with the teachers of the workshop and we happened to get matched together. We played some Santana and some other stuff and seemed to get along. At the time, it just so happened that his keyboard player had to sub out and he just thought maybe he would bring in a second guitar player and go that route,” Dunlop explained.
“We both went to Humber and it also turned out that he had the same teacher that I had when I went there 10 years later so he went to this teacher, Peter Harris, and asked him to recommend a guitar player for his band. He said Dave Dunlop and Rik said, ‘huh, I just played with Dave.’ So it kind of came together from a couple of related connections. So I went out in early 1996 and started playing with him in the band and that was pretty cool and it morphed into the Strung Out Troubadours acoustic duo thing about eight years later and that’s how it sort of took shape.”
Dunlop was also asked to join Emmett when he reunited with former Triumph bandmates Gil Moore and Mike Levine for two reunion shows in 2008 – Sweden Rocks and Rocklahoma – playing rhythm guitar. The relationship is one of mutual respect and mutual generosity, and the kind of musical camaraderie that comes when two people know one another well both on and off stage.
“It really is a partnership and it happened organically. It’s a chemistry thing and a respect for each other’s playing. I’ve got to say, as a sideman, I have played alongside a lot of people and he is by far and away the most gracious and the least ego-ed out. So being that he is a generous sort of soul, he has always given me my due and allows me to take the spotlight sometimes and he has never been insecure about it or anything. It’s just the way he is.”
Dunlop co-produced the new Emmett album RES 9. But it was during the final sessions for the record that Deanne took ill and died. Dunlop believes having some work to focus on helped him get through what was undoubtedly an excruciatingly painful, sad and confusing time.
“We were done recording and about to start mixing when she died. So I took a week off but after the memorial I said to Rik, ‘I want to come back to work tomorrow, and I want to work hard for the next month to finish this because it takes my mind of things.’ It just allowed me to focus on something else for 12 hours a day for a month or so. Some people said to me ‘how can you even work?’ And I am like, ‘well what am I going to do? Sit here and just rot and lament and mope. There’s plenty of that going on, but it’s compartmentalized.’ So being busy was a huge thing for me,” he said.
“And I will say, and I wouldn’t have known this at the time, but I was honestly still in shock for at least a month. That’s a natural protection thing for us when these things happen. And even through the entire mixing process I was still in shock to some degree. It’s like going on autopilot. It’s a survival instinct. But at the same time, I was glad I was able to go back and mix Rik’s album and be as big a part of it as I could be, and Deanne wanted that for me too. So music is good, man. Music can preserve the soul and it’s just so good in many ways.”
As a child of an air force officer, Dunlop moved around a lot, and used music as a way to cope with the constant dislocation and losing friends every three years or so. At an early age, after being introduced to guitar around age 12 or 13, he started using music as his entrepot into new friendships. He readily admits that Emmett was one of his early inspirations, alongside Alex Lifeson of Rush.
Amazingly, Dunlop was able to live out an adolescent dream during the recording of Emmett’s RES 9, as Lifeson was asked to perform on one of the tracks.
“It was bizarre and amazing at the same time. Rik and Alex Lifeson were two of my very first influences and here I am working with them on the same album. That’s just another example of how you really don’t know how things are going to take shape in your life.”
And that’s statement can refer to things that are life-affirming or life altering. Dunlop said he doesn’t believe he will tour as a solo artist, but that songs from Monarch Girl will crop up from time to time during shows with Emmett.
“I may pull together some folks and do a one-off show, just to sort of celebrate the release, but I haven’t had time to think about that yet. But I am really not, at my core, a solo artist. I think I have the capability to be one, but it’s not something I think I would enjoy. And like I said I always have the opportunity to play some stuff and sell my CDs at the Rik and Dave gigs anyways. It’s like the best of both worlds,” he said.
For more information on Dunlop and Monarch Girl, visit his website at http://davedunlop.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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