Intimacy is slippery. When it starts, it's so hard to be sure of, and when it dies, only memory can vouch it existed. Its traces lie, by definition, in territories unreachable by any outsider. And the price it exacts for its preciousness is to invent a new kind of emptiness you plunge into if its tethers break. It's funny more people don't simply opt out. Those who do - the reclusive eccentrics, confirmed bachelors, maiden aunts - seem to hold other sorts of secrets.
The gregarious and thoughtful Winnipeg musician Christine Fellows is happily married to John K. Samson, her sounding board and some-time collaborator, the singer for flagship 'Peg rock band the Weakerthans. On her superb 2005 album Paper Anniversary (which led celebrated U.S. songwriter John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats to proclaim, "Christine Fellows is writing better songs than anybody else. Everybody else is actually quite pathetic next to her"), intimacy was a conspicuous theme. She is following up with a set of musical portraits of lives marked by its apparent absence.
"At the end of the day, you are alone with yourself," she said in a recent interview. "Your self is inescapable. Even with Paper Anniversary ... I had just gotten married, but I was thinking, 'What do I do when he dies?' I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and I felt like, 'Oh my god, I can't bear the thought.' So I wrote a little sketch of my family coming home after my grandmother's husband, my grandfather, had died. I had to go to that dark place even though I was totally jubilant."
Her fourth album, Nevertheless, began with a commission from Toronto-based dancer Susie Burpee for songs for a solo performance about the spinster, the solitary woman. Fellows quickly decided to base a record on the material.
Research soon led her to a "male spinster," American collage-box artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972): "He lived with his mother his entire life, and was really shy, and fascinated with ballerinas. ... He's not a bachelor, right? He's a spinster."
Next, she discovered Cornell's correspondent, Marianne Moore, who, though reputedly celibate, and renowned for her brainy nature poems, had a flamboyant presence in New York - clad in a black cape, squiring Paris Review editor George Plimpton to baseball games, known to have a pet alligator in her bathtub.
"I fell in love instantly," Fellows said. "But I wanted to get inside the idea of why her life was that way. ... I spent a long time trying to figure out if she was gay, and so on. And why did I want to know? I wanted to know where her passion lay. And finally I realized that her passion was in poetry. It absolutely was her work and her way of looking at the world."
Much of Nevertheless was written in dialogue with Moore's resilient poetry. It also portrays a Cornell-like figure, an old farmwoman playing Gershwin for her chickens and a Winnipeg spinster named Betty (inspired by a newspaper obituary) whose pets are a couple of Parlour Rollers, a bizarre evolutionary-dead-end breed of racing pigeon that doesn't fly but turns rapid backward somersaults on the ground when it flaps its wings. ("Heartbreaking," she said.)
Clearly, it's not the usual ambit of a confessional singer-songwriter. "At a certain point, all your previous life seems to be very inward-focused, directed toward yourself. Then at some point the focus goes outward," said Fellows, a wide-eyed 39-year-old with dramatically white-blond hair. "I sneak little bits of myself in. ... But it's also, 'What's the rest of the world up to?' "
The effect is far from impersonal, thanks to the way her intricate, sensitive writing is pulled along by the melodic energies of her piano lines, chamber-string arrangements and occasional bouncy rock refrains. Her disarming voice conveys complex thoughts in chatty tones, as if in a phone call with a close friend. Which only makes the poignant twists more pulverizing.
Between cross-disciplinary commissions, arts grants and the support of her small label, Toronto's Six Shooter Records, Fellows has found a neatly Canadian niche in which, unlike some female singers reaching middle age, she's at no risk of feeling like a music-business spinster. "I didn't even know that I could sing until I was 24. I went to jazz school when I was younger, but I never sang, I just thought [being a musician]would be a kind of cool job - my grandfather had played in a big band. So I feel like I'm still kind of young with it."
The scattering of the Winnipeg music scene she settled into with her first bands in the 1990s (she grew up mainly in British Columbia) has given her another angle on solitude. Paper Anniversary was painstakingly patched together alone in a home studio. Her suite about loners was recorded far more sociably, but first she had to fly most of the players back to Manitoba. Usually, Fellows has to travel to see musical friends, on tours like the one that brings her to the Music Gallery in Toronto tomorrow night, or trips to collaborate with people such as visual artist Shary Boyle, whose magical hand-animated projections were used for the album artwork and will accompany that show.
At home, she has a sense of living "a bit off the grid." She and Samson spend their time mostly alone together, writing. "Both of us have really made an effort to stay there, because everyone leaves. ... For him it's family, and for me it's a place I chose. So I want to make it work even though technically it doesn't work."
That loyalty hints that for all the album's empathy toward spinsterhood, the earthy, voluble Fellows is an unlikely candidate for such an ascetic existence. Her heart seems to be with the pigeons - awkward, perhaps ill-fated, but paired for life. In the final track, the bluegrassy What Are Years?, she converts a well-known Moore quote into a question: "Is solitude indeed the cure for loneliness?"
And she answers: "Oh, I don't think so: I'd miss you too much."
Selected works
SOLO ALBUMS
Nevertheless (2007)
Paper Anniversary (2005)
The Last One Standing (2002)
2 little birds (2000)
COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS
Composer-in-Residence, Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers (2007-08): Commissioned to create scores for a full-length work by artistic director Brent Lott and a half-length work by choreographer Susie Burpee.
Retired (short film score, 2006)
Close to Home (animated film score with Jason Tait and installation artist Libby Hague, 2006)
Journey to Cannibal Island (score for CTV television documentary, 2005)
Christine Fellows performs at the Music Gallery in Toronto on Friday at 8 p.m.