Listening to Canadian Sarah Slean’s newest album, Metaphysics, is a lot like entering a collector’s storage unit and unveiling its hidden treasures — works of art that allow the listener to discover Slean’s genius through immersive examination. Some tracks bring to mind vintage pop-culture paraphernalia and the exuberance of bygone musicals, while others modernize classical masterworks by Bach, Verdi and Brahms. But it is this 40-year-old singer-songwriter’s experience as both a university music scholar who has been composing, producing and writing her own music on nine albums over the past 20 years, as well as a pop-music lover that makes her recent output so exceptional. Slean is as comfortable with symphonies as she is with drum machines, mixing old and new sounds, styles and genres with the energy of an ingénue and the skill of a pro. Operatic-inspired cuts such as “The Gypsy” and “A Thousand Butterflies” liaison with the past in ways that go beyond nostalgia.

“I have such an affinity to certain eras that exude elegance in every aspect of living,” Slean explains from the living room of her home in Toronto. “In the ’50s, the protagonists in films had people like Bogart and Brando — these were men of substance and character,” she says. “It goes for the women as well. There’s such a resonance there because there was such grace and tremendous humility. Let’s face it, we could use that now. Instagram does not an Audrey Hepburn make.” To counter the culture of instant gratification and floral filters, Slean took to collaging old photos of her past icons to make a video for Metaphysics’ first single, “Sarah.” “Some days, I feel it is almost as if that exquisiteness were extinct, but I’m doing my part to keep it alive, or at least remind people that it is still here.”

Revisiting her own past to write the songs for Metaphysics wasn’t as easy as fawning over Hollywood’s Golden Age. To fully grasp the emotional tenor needed for a full-length album, Slean, who was born in Pickering, Ont., followed her usual project preparation pattern and set off into a geographic and metaphoric state of self-imposed exile. Before creating her third album, 2004’s Day One, she secluded herself in a cabin outside of Ottawa. For the acclaimed 2008 The Baroness, Slean checked herself into the offline confines of a Buddhist monastery in Bordeaux. For Metaphysics, Slean was already well into a personal transformation, having undergone a very public divorce from Royal Wood, another well-known Canadian musician to whom she was married for four years.

Instead of planning a Facebook-free vacation, Slean bought the farm. Literally. Feeling the need to move away from her condo in Toronto, Slean upsized and purchased a property near Port Perry. After renovating it — in tandem with writing songs for Metaphysics — she realized a few things definitely were out of place, namely her. “I was frantically looking for this semblance of home when there was no semblance of that in me internally,” she says. “The folly of that is really clear to me now. This is a beautiful dream house except it’s not for me. It’s a house for a family of five running around in the yard. But I think that’s what was happening in me psychologically. There needed to be a rebuild.” Once again she packed up her books and headed back to Toronto. From upsize to downsize, she moved into a smaller home where she hunkered down to record her healing hymns.
Slean’s next step is taking her personal stories on the road this fall, on a cross-Canada tour. Her performance style can be described as a concert-meets-concerto-meets-cabaret, and each show is a one-of-a-kind experience with the spontaneity of new collaborators that change from stage to stage.

“I get to reconnect with musicians that come and perform with us from all over since I can’t bring a 13-piece orchestra with me wherever I go,” she says. “In some circumstances, we have even larger ensembles and it becomes this really amazing event; other times it is really small and intimate. No matter what, it all comes together because of the sheer desire that classical musicians have to make music together.”

The process of creating in such an instinctive manner is one that Slean holds close to her heart. In fact, a huge painting of a quote by English writer Aldous Huxley, created by her own hand, sits above the grand piano in her living room and serves as a permanent prompt. It reads: “All that we are and will and do, in the last analysis, depends on what we believe the nature of things to be.” It is in Huxley’s writing that Slean has found a sense of purpose that goes beyond the confines of convention but still uses traditional tools to express. “What I’m doing is trying to develop a language for breaking all the barriers, so I’m in overlapping worlds,” she says. “I’m looking for the visceral response — that overwhelming emotion or a sense of sanctity that doesn’t subscribe to any one particular way of thinking but can make a new path of thinking altogether. To me, that’s art.”

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By Elio Iannacci – *This article originally appeared in INSIGHT: The Art of Living | Fall 2017

Photos: Ivan Otis