It’s All Coming Together for Megan Jerome
Every once in a while you hear a record that stops you in your tracks, a record where everything just feels right and you wonder where did this come from? How can something sound so ripe? This was my reaction when I heard “Together Ensemble”, the latest work from Ottawa singer-songwriter Megan Jerome. Megan’s fifth to date, the album marks a turn in her musical career –new band, new songs, new approach to songwriting, and an overall new sound. Megan Jerome has always been an interesting artist, her piano-based compositions quirky and eclectic yet soulful with a knack for capturing the emotional tone of a situation. On the new record, her work is in bloom.
At a gig one time, someone asked Fred Guignon (Together Ensemble guitarist), “if I like Megan’s music what else might I like?” and Fred told him you’ll probably really like Mary Margaret O’Hara, Rebecca Campbell, and Jane Siberry. Megan doesn’t really sound like them but she has a very personal style. Megan tells me he was right on the money. “They’re like my pillars, those three,” she says. Megan’s music hits you with a disarming kind of honesty and vulnerability. Listening can feel like you’re mainlining the unfiltered feeling of a song. That honesty and directness carried over into the vision for the album which was recorded live off the floor, capturing the sound of the band as they interact with each other in real time. “We wanted something kind of earthy, we wanted something groovy, we wanted something that sounded more acoustic than electric and that sounded more natural than produced.”
In the Together Ensemble, Megan who has formal training in classical and jazz piano plays her 1962 Wurlitzer surrounded by a band featuring some of the city’s best musicians, including soulful guitarist Fred Guignon, super groovy B3 organ player Don Cummings and eclectic drummer Mike Essoudry who is also Megan’s husband. That line in the bio about how the band “envelops each song like a glowing, malleable cloud” is no exaggeration.
You can catch Megan & the Together Ensemble this Friday at the charming Kaffe 1870 in Wakefield. In the meantime, read on to learn more about Megan’s music in an excerpt from a conversation we had about her new sound.
Chrissy Steinbock: In the past you’ve performed on piano and sometimes on accordion. With the Together ensemble you’re mostly on your Wurlitzer and you’ve got this great band now too. What inspired the change of sound?
Megan Jerome: Well, it was at a gig. I was sitting in for Don in a band called the Lake Effect. They play in Ottawa and they’re really, really great people. Fred is in that band also and Dave Bignell who was in the Hammerheads. Don was able to make a gig that he wasn’t supposed to be able to make but instead of just letting Don on the gig, the guys said ‘well Megan you want to just play anyway and we’ll have two organs’ and I was like ‘yeah, of course.’ The way the band was set up was Don and I and Fred were kind of crammed together and it was so, so, so fun that I thought I’m going to make this happen, I’m going to make a band with these two [laughs]. It’s too good to pass up. . . And last spring, I just gotten together to say are you interested in playing some of this music I’ve written? I’d written some sketches; I only just had like vague ideas of some chord progressions or some rhythmic ideas or some lyric ideas. But it works.
CS: Do you think the possibility of playing with those musicians shaped the way the songs came together for this record?
MJ: Yeah, definitely. I think that, plus the whole spirit of the thing from the start where I was like ‘well, I don’t have to make them. I’m just listening for these songs.’ I feel much less possessive about them than I have about my other songs. I didn’t go to these guys with parts. I just went to them and said ‘let’s play’ and I would just start playing and whatever they would do would happen so the sound of the band is very, very influenced by the people in it. I didn’t tell them anything.
CS: It’s almost like an old-time sing along where everybody brings an instrument and nobody is the boss; they’re just filling in the sound as they feel. There’s a whole other level of listening as a player when you’re not being told what to do.
MJ: Yes, and freedom and trust.
CS: What was the inspiration or vision for this newest record?
MJ: We had a few records and moods we were listening to. So there was the recent Rickie Lee Jones “Balm and Gilead”… And even Al Green. Mike and I had been to New Orleans a bunch of times in the last three years and Don, the organ player is totally into that kind of music (gospel and blues and organ jazz). Frank Guignon - you know, he sounds like Daniel Lanois, only he sounds like Fred Guignon but there’s that kind of flavour. Daniel Lanois spent time in New Orleans and the album “Wrecking Ball” by Emmylou Harris and “Teatro” by Willie Nelson, Daniel Lanois produced both of those. And Brian Blade is a drummer that Mike loves and Brian Blade has also played in Daniel Lanois’ band so that groove came organically from the people I’m playing with.
CS: I see that New Orleans influence
MJ: Sort of like an awareness, like they know about that and they’ve listened to it.
CS: It’s maybe not at the forefront but it informs it.
MJ: You know it reminds me of some other things I was listening to. There’s a guy named Gregory Porter. We saw him at the jazz festival in New Orleans last summer and his record has all these terrific grooves on it.
CS: So really tuning into rhythms and the interplay among them.
MJ: And getting into your body. That probably has a lot to do with what you were hearing and mentioned earlier, that feeling of ‘yay, I’m here and I’m feeling like this is who I am’. Maybe I’m not so much in my head anymore and more in my body or maybe it’s more balanced.
CS: What’s your writing process like? Where do you find inspiration?
MJ: I have a lot of ease around writing. I write for a little bit most days when I’m in a writing phase. Right now, I’m more into performing and promoting the album. But when I’m in a writing phase, I don’t like to sit down and write until a song is done or anything. I just work on it for a little bit everyday.
What I did with this album and this is awesome - I realized I don’t have to make these songs, I can just listen for them. I just have to listen. So I take an idea and go to the piano and improvise with it for a while and just go what do I want to hear next? How do I want this to go? And then I record myself and listen back and it’s really easy to hear when I think there’s a moment where I thought that would be cool and that feels really cheesy and then you take those out and say ‘ok, what do I want to hear next?’
I was listening to a bunch of field recordings and I love those because it’s just a person who doesn’t necessarily think of themselves as a performer, which is a lot like my family music life growing up. They were very, very musical people in my family and our friends but nobody was performing at these Sunday sing along things. They just ‘oh, this one goes like this’ and they’d just sing it.
CS: Some artists come up with these mission statements for why they make music. What drives you to make music?
MJ: It’s what I think the whole point of my life is. It’s how I express myself, and it’s how I express thanks for being alive. I came to a feeling at a certain point like what’s the whole point? Then I thought ‘well, maybe the whole point of my life is just to express thanks for being alive’ and this is part of how I do that.
—Chrissy Steinbock, Couch Assassin