In the right hands, with that rare combination of talent, time, serendipity, and the appropriate songs, music has the power to not only evoke and provoke emotion, but also represent and embody a time, a place – an environment. Usually it is the environment in which the music is composed and recorded, imbuing the final product with a one-of-a-kind energy that cannot be transposed, replicated or harnessed for long.
When you have someone who is as gifted, as prescient, as fearless and as passionate about her craft as the inimitable Canadian violinist/vocalist/songwriter Miranda Mulholland, this sort of music is possible. And, in fact, has been realized with the release of her latest solo album, the intoxicatingly charming By Appointment or Chance. It features a deftly seamless combination of traditional folk tunes, alongside contemporary folk compositions, including a number by Mulholland herself, and was released Oct. 11 on her own Roaring Girl Records label.
Mulholland, currently one half of the award-winning folk duo Harrow Fair as well as a past member of Belle Starr, the Roaring Girl Choir and a collaborator with the likes of Sarah Slean, Great Lake Swimmers and Jim Cuddy, was in England for a time and was inspired by her surroundings to put together this album, calling in friends and favours to record live off the floor in a delightful little English village.
“It was sort of a matter of luck and circumstance. I hadn’t really considered doing anything like this. Harrow Fair is really busy, and we have our own record coming out in the spring. So, I have lots of things that are ongoing. Last Christmas my father said to me that he had been thinking a lot about my voice. He is a professor and an introvert and usually doesn’t get emotional, but he was talking about just how much the albums that I had made as a solo artist had meant to him. I guess that was the first seed that dropped. Then I went back to do this cat and house sitting stint that I have been doing for years in a little village called Twyford, south of London. It just came to me one day that I have all this time and since I am not good at sitting still and just relaxing, I thought it would be perfect to do something while I was there,” she explained from her family home in Guelph, Ontario (she lives in Toronto), adding that it also happened that producer/guitarist friend Tali Trow, Canadian bassist Joe Phillips, and Australian jazz harpist Tara Minton were coincidentally available to participate.
“The house is owned by a promoter I met on a previous tour and I stayed there. I just loved it and fell in love with this village. To me, coming from Guelph and then living in Toronto to go to a village like this where you’re an hour and a quarter from London by train, but you’re surrounded by rolling hills and beautiful waterways and great walks. There’re two pubs in the village, and this general store that sells local produce and incredible things and even great wine – all just steps away. He said a few years ago he needed a house and cat sitter, so I have been coming for a few years now.
“In the back garden there’s a Swiss cottage, which is just an empty wooden structure where they put on house concerts. It looked like the perfect place to be kind of a blank canvass. So, Tali brought a whole bunch of microphones and he set up in the space and we got to record this album completely live off the floor. We all stayed in the house and cooked meals together at the end of the day. There was definitely a feeling that we were making something that was just capturing a really specific time and place.”
All extremely experienced and exceedingly competent and experienced musicians, Mulholland wanted the most spontaneous and exciting takes possible, so only gave them the music on the day they were to record specific songs.
“We would do everything on the fly, including the arrangements. I didn’t give them the music beforehand. We would just learn everything together on the day and then we would rehearse it a few times and try a few recordings of it. If it didn’t feel right when we listened back the next day, we might do it again. We tried to keep a pretty quick pace just to get through all the songs,” she explained.
“Certain takes would be great, but the village just happens to be underneath the flight path for the Southampton Airport, so sometimes we would be right in the middle of a great take and hear rumblings of a big aircraft and have to stop. But, overall, it was pretty magical because it was a real feeling that the four of us were doing something in a room together and capturing it. That was really special.”
By Appointment or Chance is technically her second solo album coming after 2014’s Whipping Boy, although The Roaring Girls Cabaret album, In Last Night’s Party Clothes, released in 2008, could also be considered a solo record since she recorded, sang and played violin on all tracks. A fan of collaborations, she decided to take more of the reins on Whipping Boy and even more so for By Appointment or Chance.
“I made Whipping Boy when I happened to be living in Los Angeles and it felt like me taking a step into that kind of space where I was saying, ‘yeah, I write songs too. And I love this, and I am proud of this music.’ But at the time I was touring with Great Lake Swimmers and I wasn’t even able to tour that record or do any kind of promo. I have always loved collaborations a lot more, but this new album sort of felt like a beautiful marriage of the two,” she said.
“I chose the songs and they are very special to me. I chose the band and they are very special to me. I chose the place in the world that was very special to me and then we arranged everything together. But I still got to be the voice and my violin is at the forefront. Everyone really rallied behind me, so it really was the perfect blend of solo work and collaboration.
“I think for this one too, I really just wanted to honour my father who had kind of come out from behind his shell. He really doesn’t speak about those kinds of things and he said a lot of things about my voice and I really wanted him to hear it. He was not well at the time when he said that. I think, very personally, I wanted to give him this present.”
It is, in fact, a present to all Mulholland’s current and future fans, as the unbridled joy of the recording experience, the influence of the peaceful, pastoral surroundings and the dynamic of the musical selections make for a truly special listening experience.
“I had a really happy time having great discoveries. It was kind of a perfect storm to do this album. I don’t have any sort of big manifesto for it. I feel as though Harrow Fair and the album we’re making is very intentional and a focus for me, which I am very excited about. But this was just a celebration of how far I have come since playing fiddle in the pubs while going to university and collecting all these songs,” she said, as she talked about the various songs on By Appointment or Chance.
“Bar Rage is mine. It’s a fiddle tune that I wrote years and years ago and there’s a version of it on Whipping Boy. But I wanted to do it again because I started rehearsing it with Tara the harpist and she’s got such a cool way of interpreting things. The harp is just so magical and working on it with her we managed to get this totally different sound. If you listen to the two versions, they are so different. The harp just sparkles and it’s pretty exciting, so I knew we just had to do it for this album. It defies expectations because it’s not a rollicking song like it is on Whipping Boy. The title actually comes from a travelling fiddle show that I was a part of when I was 20 called Barrage, which is based in Calgary. I wrote this fiddle tune and it was based on some of the fiddle motifs we did there. And it didn’t end up being a super happy situation. I didn’t end my time on that show as the happiest camper. So, I just split the word up and called the song Bar Rage, which is kind of a cheeky little joke. Raglan Road, like Peg & Awl and Old Churchyard, is a traditional song that I learned in a pub and have just never forgot about it. Its so beautiful. Crossing the Bar is a song that I wrote for my dad for Christmas about 15 years ago. I recorded it on the Roaring Girl Cabaret record but in a very weird jazzy way that I didn’t think suited the song. I actually sort of wrote it for Loreena McKennitt, so by adding the harp, I got to do it the way I always wanted it to be done. I wrote the music and [Alfred Lord] Tennyson wrote the poetry.
“Black Diamond is an original by a guy named Jordie Lane who is this incredible Australian songwriter. He is so fun, and has got great, great songs. This is a crazy story song about a miner who falls in love with the ghost of a hooker in a hotel. I mean, you’re never going to hear another song about that. When Jordie does it he tells a fairly long story about how he wrote it. But even just getting that snapshot of this mining town and this person who is in love with this ghost of a hooker is something else. And then going back to tell the boys in the mine all about it. It’s just so entrancing and really captures the imagination.”
A standout track, at least in the heart and mind of the author of this article, is the final full track, Parting Glass, which is equal parts sweetness and sadness, making for a potentially teary listen.
“It’s an old traditional song that I learned from a Newfoundlander named Daniel Payne, who showed me an amazing version by a [Irish] group called The Voice Squad. So, like the title of the album says, I came by a lot of these tunes by appointment or by chance. I was either asked to learn them, or I found them along the way, or someone gave them to me. That’s how this whole album came to be, even just bringing people together and the place that it was in, all came by appointment or by chance,” Mulholland said.
“That album starts with Birds, and I actually recorded the birds on my phone in the morning. When I would wake up in that house, because there’s a huge tree right outside the window, the dawn chorus was so loud, but what a beautiful way to wake up. It’s really exceptional, so that was just recorded on my voice memo and I thought it would be a nice way to start the album. And then as you go through this journey, it feels as though the pacing and mix of old songs and new songs and traditional, just getting it all right and Parting Glass is probably the only way that the album good end. It’s a really beautiful song, and it could be a goodbye to the trip, it could be about death, but it’s a really heavy, beautiful Irish folk song. Then the album finishes with the birds at dusk who came back to that same tree, and so I recorded them again. For this whole project, I really wanted to give the listener the feeling of being in that room with us when we were making that record.”
Besides being busy with solo work, Harrow Fair and guest appearances with other artists, Mulholland is an in-demand advocate for fair remuneration for musicians in the face of streaming and other platforms that pay artists a pittance, as well as being the organizer of the Muskoka Music Festival in Ontario’s Cottage Country. She also is the only artist on the board of directors of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto.
“I think I just like to know things. I am really curious, and everything informs everything else. I want to be a better musician, but I want to know how we can change the ecosystem to be better for all of my colleagues. I think it’s really important, especially now, for artists to step forward and knock on doors and be at those tables. Being on the Massey Roy Thomson board is really important right now. I am the only artist and we were in the middle of this huge refurbishment of Massey and to be the only artist in that room who has performed in that hall means my opinion has a lot of weight,” she said.
“And more and more we need to cut through the infantilization of artists. I think people think, ‘oh artists wouldn’t want to do that,’ or ‘they don’t like meetings.’ I have literally been told these things. People have told me that I would probably be bored at these meetings. I am just never bored. There are so many things to think about. I wanted to learn how to make those changes, and you have to learn to walk before you can run. So, I started my label, and I got to see a lot of the problems in the system and the challenges. Running a label in this day and age makes me no money. I basically use any of the profits to pay my bookkeeper because of the streaming services and things like that, there’s just so much bookkeeping to keep straight.
“At the same time, I am learning. I have so much at my disposal now in terms of contacts and information and best practices. So, I can then apply those moving forward for myself and to help others. Again, I am very curious, and I want to find solutions to things. I think it its good to be more interested as a key to living.”
Mulholland currently has no solo shows, but Harrow Fair is supporting The Jayhawks coming up from Nov. 20 to 24. For more information on all Mulholland’s endeavours, including By Appointment or Chance, visit https://www.mirandamulholland.ca.
- 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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