On the surface, Tara MacLean is in a happy, fulfilled place in her life. The native of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, who spends more than half the year in her home province, is happily raising her three daughters in this coast idyll, flush with art, music and culture, enfolded by lush landscapes, and sandy seaside beaches.
Creatively, MacLean is preparing for a run at the venerable and prestigious Charlottetown Festival with her musical stage show, Atlantic Blue, and continues to write and collaborate on songs with artists under her publishing deal with Sony/ATV. For a few years in the early to mid-2000s she was also an integral member of the powerhouse trio Shaye, alongside Damhnait Doyle and Kim Stockwood.
But alongside this wonderful existence, MacLean had something nagging at her spirit – something that was tugging at her artistic heart and creative soul, urging her to dig down, to unshackle the treasure trove of musical magic that was being stored away for some as-yet-undetermined rainy day. She felt compelled to finally create music that would come to mark her illustrious and emotionally spellbinding re-entry into the music business as a solo artist of importance and with something significant.
She needed to go Deeper. And on the new album of the same name, to be released independently on June 23, MacLean certainly did just that.
Deeper is her fifth studio album overall, and first of all original material since Wake came out in 2008. In the interim MacLean issued the Atlantic Blue album, which saw her cover material from other notable east coast artists, as well as the EP Evidence. MacLean first burst onto the scene in 1996 with the release of her debut album Silence, after being signed a couple of years earlier by Nettwerk Records. A second album, Passenger was released by both Nettwerk and Capitol Records after signing with the international label.
Deeper is still highlighted by MacLean’s exceptionally emotive voice and ability to convey emotion through words, music and her vocal performance, but is also infused with a strength of conviction and invested with such forthright honesty and authenticity that makes sears every syllable into the soul of the listener.
“It’s my first one with original music. I have been writing a lot, but mostly trying to write for other artists and I thought maybe I wasn’t going to be doing it professionally again under my own name. I sort of dismantled that chip and instead I just wanted to continue to create music but for other people. So, I went down to Nashville a lot and L.A. a lot and always ended up finding my favourite Canadian writers, strangely enough, like Stefan Macchio, Simon Wilcox and Gordie Sampson. I guess I though my days as a solo artist were done. I think once you have kids, it’s hard to see a future as a touring artist sometimes, as a woman specifically, I might say. And I love touring, but the only way that I knew touring was the Nettwerk school of touring, which was just constant. You get on the road and you don’t get off. I didn’t think I could do that again. I couldn’t really see another way to be a solo performer, because I had never really learned another way,” she explained.
“But music kept coming out of me and I kept wanting to write it. I would demo these songs that I had written for other people and I started to remember that I could do it too. Music is always coming out of me and I had a lot of encouragement from people around me saying, ‘you should really remember who you are.’ Truly my greatest joy in life is performing. And creating Atlantic Blue really helped me remember that as well, even though I was singing the songs of other people. But they were the Atlantic Canadian folks that inspired me my whole life and telling stories of their lives and how no matter what, they just kept going, sometimes with insurmountable odds against them, yet they still kept going, like Rita MacNeil and Stompin’ Tom. I thought I could draw from their strength, from their stories and remember that I have this ability and I have this desire to play. And it’s just been so great. I found myself again, post-motherhood. I guess it’s sort of a resurrection.”
Once MacLean began to make tentative steps towards what would become the Deeper album, she reached out to prolific and well-respected PEI singer/songwriter Dennis Ellsworth for advice and for some inspired collaborations. The confidence she gained from the material that they were producing elevated her compositional output and the return of Tara MacLean as a solo artist was back in full swing.
“It started to cascade, definitely, once I opened that door. I am glad I kept my chops up by writing with the intention of writing for others. I feel like sometimes when you’re a mom and have kids, you don’t have time and energy to create anything else because creating a family is a lot. And I thought maybe my songs were gone. I really thought that I wasn’t going to have the energy or the desire again to get up on that stage. And what I realized is the songs will wait for you. They are not gone; they just wait there until it’s time to release them. So that’s what happened,” she said.
“And honestly, I wasn’t 100 per cent sure I was going to make the record until I was sitting and playing piano for my girlfriend and she said, ‘you’ve got a lot of songs in you and you really need to make this album.’ So, she supported me to do that by funding it. And even then, I tried to backtrack out of it because I was nervous and didn’t know if I could be at the helm and make a great album. I sort of doubted my ability for a second and Dennis said to me, ‘no, this is your time.’”
The title track is a lovely, lush song that epitomizes the them of breaking through barriers to get at the crux, the core, the heart of the matter [to paraphrase Don Henley] within the context of a relationship.
“It’s a love song. It’s about exactly what I am talking about – intimacy and getting closer. We meet a lot of people who have a lot of armour because they have been hurt and because they just don’t trust any more. They don’t believe in love anymore. I love the idea of loving someone through their scars and through their pain, in order to get to that place of trust again and healing hearts. So that’s what the song is about, it’s loving someone through their armour,” MacLean explained.
Besides Ellsworth, MacLean invited a veritable who’s who of PEI’s music community to chip in to Deeper, including the likes of Adam Brazier, Tim Chaisson, Megan Blanchard, Catherine MacLellan, Alicia Toner, Nick Doneff, Kinley Dowling, Deryl Gallant, Trevor Grant, Kim Dunn, Jeremy Gallant, Natalie Williams-Calhoun, Gilbert Sark and Hubert Francis. The album was primarily produced by MacLean and Ellsworth, with assistance from Colin Gilmore Buchanan, Bill Bell and Gordie Sampson. It was recorded at The Hill Sound Studio and engineered by Adam Gallant.
“When I came back to PEI a few years ago after spending time in Nashville and did the Atlantic Blue album and all these musicians were coming in to guest on the album, I was floored. I knew that great music came from here, but it’s almost as though I had forgotten how good. I knew there were some of the heavy Acadian cats who have just been immersed for generations in music and then to realize that there were world-class engineers and studios was amazing. So, as it was my first time producing my own album, I realized that producing really just gathering the best people together and capturing the music they make. I invited my friends in and we created an album that’s really a community album. I am so blown away by the scene here and I am so thrilled to be a part of it,” she said, adding that she felt comfortable and confident by being part of such a community and that this fearlessness led her to abandon and pretense and bare her soul, unleash her most powerful and intimate feelings and craft songs that give the listening a real insight into MacLean as a woman, a mom and an artist.
“I am older since I made my last album. I have been through a divorce, I have been through having three babies, I have been through the loss of my sister and death and birth and love and heartache. To me, the entire point of living is to go deeper all the time. One of the things that has been a really profound transformation in my life is I began studying Zen meditation with a teacher. One of the things he said to me, quoting this very revered teacher named Dogen, was that enlightenment is intimacy with all things. It’s not this kind of thing that we’re looking to move towards, it’s just being fully in your life and experiencing it and that’s what I want to be.
“I realized as I get older this is a temporary situation here and what I really want to do is experience it and get close to people and get close to life and close to every experience. When I was writing the music for Deeper, I was just trying to open myself up further to the experience of being alive – and that means feelings, that means fury, and it also means writing and singing in a way that I haven’t yet. People used to say to me, ‘your records are good, but when we see you live, it’s so different, it’s so much deeper.’ I wanted to capture that on this album. I wanted to sing as though I was singing to save my life.”
Part of MacLean’s motivation is to be an example for her three daughters, Sophia, Stella and Flora in the sense that she models a path in life that is fulfilling and natural and rewarding, but one in which chafes against some of the outdated ideas of the roles of women and moms in society.
“My girls want to see me succeed. Once I was really missing performing a few years ago. Like I said, performing live to me is the ultimate thing. I love standing on stage and looking into the eyes of someone and singing right to them. So, I would sing to my kids. I was playing piano one day and I remember almost picturing myself being on a stage as I played, and I remember tears dropping down my cheeks, and I turned around and the girls, who were quite young, had set up all their stuffies behind me like a little audience, so when I turned around there was this audience of bears and dolls. It was so cute, and I knew that they understood me in a way. I think it’s important for children to see their mothers living their dreams and it’s important especially for girls to see their fathers supporting their mothers to live their dreams fully,” she said.
“I am not going to fall for this idea that I have a specific role, that I have to be a certain kind of mother. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s an old paradigm that has left us shackled to a domestic role, and I am not really interested in that anymore.”
MacLean was at the apparent apex of her career when she was dumped from her label, Capitol Records, ostensibly by becoming pregnant in the early 2000s. And remember readers, this was in the 21st century, not the 19th. The rampant sexism and misogyny and the process whereby sex appeal was venerated more than talent impeded many a career over the years and has left its scars. For MacLean, while deeply upsetting and demoralizing at the time, that moment steeled her resolve to pursue her career and her life on her own terms. This has come to beautiful fruition on Deeper, with truly powerful statement songs such as Ghosting Me, Wildfire [which at one point was the working title for the record] and shattered.
“I wouldn’t be where I am if that hadn’t happened and I am so grateful for the man who did that. I am so grateful for everything that has brought me here because this is exactly where I want to be. I am living my dream: I feel the love every single day, every single show. To go back to where you belong, where you come from, and start from scratch is a really powerful thing, because you realize that you’re surrounded by love and family and people that just want you to soar in your life. So, I am doing it; I am doing it for them, and I am doing it for my daughters,” she said, emphatically.
“Things are much better now for women, but I am watching my teenaged daughters and the pressure is still there, the same pressure to look a certain way, and to present yourself in a certain way. There is still a lot to fight for and the only way I know how is to break free from those outdated expectations and ideas. And what is important for me as an artist is that what’s real is the music. That’s all that matters, nothing else matters. I never had this ‘I have to be famous’ thing. To me, it was always about music – music that connects and if one person hears it or a million people hear it, it doesn’t matter, all that matters is you’re making the music you want to make.”
The haunting Beneath the Path of Crows continues MacLean’s lifelong passion for supporting Canada’s indigenous peoples and was composed as an anthem for the current reconciliation movement between First Nations people and the governments and institutions of Canada.
“Senator Brian Francis, who was the chief of the Abegweit Mi’kmaq Nation here in PEI had mentioned he would love a song written for the Mi’kmaq people. Then later when I was at this pow-wow with him, Chief Matilda Ramjatton, of Lennox Island looked at me and said, ‘you will write us a song.’ And I said okay. I brought the initial idea to Dennis and we brought what we created to Senator Francis and played it for him, and he wrote this piece in the middle, which was like a forgiveness chant. It says, ‘we can find a way to move forward together, if you acknowledge what you’ve done, we can build a new relationship of trust. One cannot move without the other; we need each other to forgive.’ And I thought it was so beautiful, so we got Hubert Francis, who is a legendary indigenous musician from New Brunswick to sing it in Mi’kmaq and drummed and chanted. And our other friend Gilbert Sark came in drummed and chanted. Tim Chaisson sang and played fiddle on the song, so it’s become this incredible collaboration of indigenous and non-indigenous musicians,” she said.
“I am very passionate about reconciliation. It’s sort of my number one thing that my heart feels drawn to work for. And I have a lot of opportunity to do that on Prince Edward Island now, there is a lot of government support for some very high-level reconciliation projects. Gord Downie did give us our marching orders for sure. There’s a lot of work to be done all over the place. It was just nice to have a profile here where people would trust me with ideas of reconciliation.”
Without being to pithy, the theme of reconciliation could also be stretched to include much of what this article has been chronicling – the reconciliation of Tara MacLean and her sense of artistry as a songwriter, recording artist and performer, the reconciliation of the hard knocks of her past personal and professional life with the wisdom, grace and understanding those experiences have bequeathed to her.
It is a reconciliation, or revitalization, or re-emergence – however one wishes to characterize it – that is emblazoned on every track on Deeper. It is a tour de force of authenticity, honest, compositional mastery and is eminently memorable .
With its release, it will announce to the music industry and music lovers that Tara MacLean is more than just back, but that she is set to make her mark, to let her voice be heard and that her desire to connect on a deep level with her audience is as ardent as it’s ever been.
For more information on forthcoming shows, the album Deeper, and more, visit http://www.taramacleanmusic.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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