Simple instruments can be quite complicated when you get to know them. Laura Barrett's kalimbas are just wooden boxes with narrow metal keys flaring from their surfaces, but no two of them play exactly the same scale. Some might call that a flaw, but for Barrett, it's a virtue. She's especially fond of the ones whose keys she has adjusted to produce uniquely raw and “gnarly” sounds, in wonky scales you won't find on a piano.
“On this one, the lowest tone is so low, you can't hear the fundamental tone, just the overtones,” she said, thumbing a key to release a faint and complex tangle of sound. “I love that, it's like a gong.”
Barrett is a Toronto musician whose songs are as simple, and as complicated, as the instrument she has brought to new pop prominence. They have the open-handed charm of old-time Broadway melodies and the playful inscrutability of a Dada collage – they're nerdy, whimsical, erudite and romantic. just like the rather elfin woman who makes them. Barrett recently produced an album's worth, entitled Victory Garden, and it's a record unlike any other.
She sings in a voice like that of an underage big-band singer, a pure opaque soprano that blooms on the microphone like tropical flowers. Her most characteristic accompaniments are the pouncing, flooding sounds of her piano, or the pungent tinkling of her kalimbas, though Victory Garden features a bouquet of strings, reeds, vibraphone and even a theremin.
“I grew up surrounded by singers and dancers,” one of whom was her mother, Barrett says. “My father ran a dinner theatre, His Majesty's Feast, on Lake Shore Boulevard. It doesn't exist any more, but it was around for 18 years. They would pipe in medieval music as you were coming in and being seated, but all the songs were pilfered from stage musicals of the time.”
Steeped in the family business of putting over a song, she studied piano and clarinet, and throughout high school wrote her own songs, including one (she won't say which) that eventually found a place on Victory Garden. She still has masses of audio tape from the song-storming sessions of her teenage years.
“My songs generally were very melodramatic, like forties Broadway,” she said of those early efforts. “I would just sit there and improvise and write lyrics. I would never perform them in front of anybody but my mother. She has always encouraged me to express myself. All my musical tastes, from zero to age 17, were basically hers.”
Barrett went to university to study physics and math, with no thought of becoming a performer. She also took linguistics classes (she and a friend had made up their own language in Grade 4), driven in part by the romantic notion that as we take on new languages, we become different people.
“I think if I had taken theoretical math I would be on a totally different path now,” she says. “I would be doing grad studies in math.”
But by mistake she got into a tediously practical part of the discipline, interrupted her studies after one degree, and began tutoring and doing educational presentations of a menagerie of reptiles she carried from one school to another. She kept writing songs, not for herself but for some as-yet-unidentified performers whose skills would be far beyond hers.
