A decade in the making, one third of the beloved Canadian roots-pop trio of The Good Lovelies – Kerri Ough – is set to release her long-anticipated, long-percolating debut album, One Day Soon.
Logistics played a considerable role in the decade-long process that finally sees One Day Soon finally unveiled for the world, ad the Good Lovelies spend great swaths of each calendar year on the road. But there was more at work, and in hindsight, the lengthy, sometimes convoluted and deeply contemplative process was worth it in the end, as not only is Ough happy with the nine songs that make up the album but believes they have even more depth and meaning today than in the early days of their conception.
“It took about a decade to complete a collection of 18 songs actually, that I distilled down to nine. As I kept going along, I would drop some of the older songs, and from the last batch of the oldest songs there is a song called When You Weren’t There, and it made the cut. But from that point onward, the songs I compiled became this collection that became One Day Soon. And I jokingly gave it that title five years ago; I was like, ‘it will come out someday – one day soon.’ It took so long to get each song done, and then I would go on tour with the Good Lovelies and I would come back, with another year under my belt on the road with the band. I would get back into the studio and say to [producer] Adam King [Ria Mae, Good Lovelies, Jill Barber] that things have changed. I would often still like a song but now I might not want to play it on acoustic guitar, I want to play it on electric guitar. Or my voice might sound different, so let’s add this harmony, or let’s put real strings on this part instead of keys. So, he would let me go back in and open up these songs over and over giving them a new life,” she explained.
“And interestingly I am still connecting with these songs. It was a really interesting process because a lot of people might lose that connection and say this song doesn’t really mean anything to me any more. But some of them I wrote when I was 30 and I am 38 now, and they still have that meaning and I am still able to see the value in them and love them and want to play them. I believe I needed the record to finally come out to sort of put to bed these songs that I am proud of, so that I can make the next record of personal songs that are more current.
“But I also think that it wasn’t necessarily that I was being a perfectionist, it was that it was probably more fear. I would say I was probably delaying this release. I don’t think I was worried about them not being just so, I think I was just not ready and so I would just go back and tinker and then go back and tinker again.”
Ough’s motivation for what eventually became the album was to create a piece of music that would have meaning and purpose for her, and also for those who listened to it. She wanted to create the sort of album that inspired and touched her spirit as a young woman and young artist.
“I don’t know that it was very much different in how I approached any other record. I want to be proud of what I am putting out and I wanted to be able to stand behind it. It is still so new out in the world that I am kind of unprepared for how it will be received. I think it goes back to why I make records in the first place, and it used to be how I experienced music. I would listen to the CDs thinking that the artist was writing and performing just for me. I listened to Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy on my Discman for like a year, and I never listened to it with anybody and I never went to see her play. I just listened to her singing those songs and I was like, ‘yeah, yeah this is how I want to communicate with this artist’. And it makes you feel close to them and feel like they are putting to music something that you have felt,” she explained.
“This album is so personal, and I am grateful that it’s personal. I am grateful that I wrote it when I did because maybe I wouldn’t have put it out if I had written those songs 10 years later. Maybe I can’t write those songs any more. I guess I wanted to connect with people in a way where, if they never come to see the songs live, I hope they hear a track that resonates with them, or that they feel a personal connection, as if I was writing it just for them.”
The songs were primarily crafted a decade ago, with Ough chipping away at the recording over the intervening years, changing, tweaking, adding and subtracting something each time she re-encountered them.
The is a beautiful simplicity to many of the musical compositions on One Day Soon, and these are mirrored by lyrics that have a profound depth of meaning but are also concomitantly conversational. There is an overriding and deeply moving stillness and quietness that permeates the album compounding the impact of every note played and every word sung.
“I think that comes back to the beginning when I was figuring out how to voice these things. I sang differently; I expressed myself with a quieter feeling. And, personally, if someone took this record and laid down and listened to it at 11 o’clock at night, looking out the window and never saw the show, I am okay with that. I believe that the two experiences – the live show and the personal listening experience of the album – can co-exist. Watching us live is going to be very different than sitting there with a 36-minute record and just feeling the feelings. It is soft, and I wouldn’t be offended if someone called it their sleepy record. It’s not drama driven, there are not a lot of dynamics, there’s not a lot of ups and downs. And I like that sonically and really enjoy listening to records like that myself,” Ough explained adding that the sentiments of love, loss and longing are expressed lyrically in ways that are relatable and unapologetically simple and familiar – almost conversational.
“When my now husband and I were first together, I was living far away from him halfway through the writing of this record. And we would come home from after a tour and Caroline [Brooks] and Sue [Passmore] would go home to their partners and I would go home, and I would have different nightly rituals, so I wasn’t feeling lonely. And Brian and I would put Skype on and just run it for three hours while we kind of had our evening, even if we weren’t engaging in conversation. I would watch him cook dinner while I finished up my accounting.
“There was so much time to realize that when I did have our two weeks together and when you’re actually with the person and they do the things that make you realize why you liked them in the first place and enjoy their company, like going for a bike ride, or walking through the snow with them, or just cuddling up under huge duvets because its cold outside – those are the images that are basically telling the story of that experience. There’s no big sweeping romantic statements, no drama, no fantasy stuff, just the real life moments that make you miss someone or want someone.”
As well as being a tongue-in-cheek reference to the length of the creative process, the album title and title track for One Day Soon has a number of meanings for Ough and can also be interpreted in different ways by the listener.
“At its simplest, as I said, One Day Soon means will this record ever come out, because it’s taking forever. But it’s also saying one day soon we will live together, one day soon I will see you again. I started the track listing on the album with that song because I wanted the record, even though its sort of a break-up record, it’s also about hope and romance and starting a new relationship. I wanted to start on that note because I was and always will be a romantic and an optimist at heart,” she said.
“[Lead off single] How’s This Going to End is kind of related to the title track because I am obsessed with the big question as to why we ever delayed anything. Why did it take so long to put this record out, what was I afraid of? Life is so short, it’s so absurd not to share it. Even if it’s a total flop, I wrote it, I liked it – is that not worth something? So, How’s This Going to End is saying, ‘who knows what’s going to happen; I have no idea.’ It’s basically saying there’s no reason to wait for anything, because the price of waiting can sometimes be really painful and regretful. Brian and I have this, and actually I have this with a lot of my very close friends, and it’s that I am not going to not tell this person that I love them. I am not going to wait until they’re dead to give them their eulogy. My dad is 72 and I love him, and I hug him for an uncomfortable amount of time every time I see him, and I let him know. And of course, there’s the greater existential meaning of How’s This Going to End which is life in general and all that.”
The back-to-back songs, My Body’s Cold/Take Off Your Clothes are imbued with a sweetness and an authenticity that, again gets back to the simple, very human and natural expression of everyday sadness, loneliness, affection and desire for a deeper connection with the one we love. The final track, the aforementioned When You Weren’t There went through many permutations and, while the production is lusher, including a lovely build-up of strings throughout the second half of the piece, it sees Ough resolved to the end of a relationship before the excitement of a new one on the horizon.
“It really happened during the overlap between one relationship ended and another one starting, and both of them sort of imploding at the same time. And I remember saying, ‘what is happening with these people who keep coming and going from my life?’ And I had no idea. From that time in my life, I can remember the exact moment of sitting in my basement apartment in Toronto and it made me laugh. At the time I felt like an insane person because I had these perfect people in my life, and I just have to run away because I don’t know what to do.”
One Day Soon was officially released on March 8, with a special album release party happening on March 21, at the Burdock in Toronto. It follows a string of dates on the east coast that had Ough and accompanist Ben Whiteley opening for Royal Wood. She said she will be doing another extensive solo trek with friend and musician Christine Bougie later in the year, possibly in June, or more likely in September or October. In the interim The Good Lovelies have a big, full-band tour of the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands that will take up much of April and May, before they head back into the studio to work on a new album later in 2019.
For more information on Ough and One Day Soon, visit http://www.kerriough.com.
For more information on The Good Lovelies, visit http://goodlovelies.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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