With delightful easy humour, Megan Lane describes the years of hard work, hard knocks and fun that brought her bluesy style to pop rock
If the road to a music career is paved with practise then Megan Lane should have a pretty smooth ride from this point forward.
Sister of Canadian songbird Jen Lane, with brother, Jeremy Lane, releasing online, she has stories a-plenty of a family raised by music fans where toys were instruments and Christmas lists boiled down to begging for a rock ’n’ roll electric guitar.
Like any formidable talent, her first songwriting masterpiece isn’t about the technique, the hours of theory, starting the blues circuit at age 12, mastering the vibrato needed, or the skill to make the guitar sound as though it too has feelings, but rather about telling her story.
“I think you grow up faster when you’re faced with really heavy things like being a social outcast or having to fear for your life in certain situations,” she explained.
Both her and Rae Spoon, with whom she co-wrote the first single, Someday We Will Leave This Town, off her new album, Sounding the Animal, grew up queer in small town Saskatchewan. The upbeat riff rock anthem, humorously influenced by the What Does the Fox Say? phenomenon in its video, sticks in the head like peanut butter to the roof of your mouth, leaving fans a taste of its upbeat bop pop for hours.
The album is technically her third full-length effort, but the first she is proud of, with friend and fellow musician Hawksley Workman producing, co-writing and lending his musical hand to the creation.
Penned in Montreal, and in a cabin in Saskatchewan’s boreal forest, it marks a major step outside the box for the young blues fiend.
“Blues was a real guitar sport, but I kind of out grew it as I wanted to try and experiment with lots of different structures and with songwriting,” she said.
Writing 50 songs before selecting the best ones, Lane wasn’t precious with the material. The result, nevertheless, does include a song about a cabin in a woods, as one might expect, but it also hosts a hidden ghost.
“I’m kind of like a weird witchy being. My great-grandma was kind of like this pretty interesting lady that owned an antique store and believed everything held energy, so she taught us to be open to these things,” she said.
The album drops Aug. 22 and Lane hits Kelowna for her first appearance in years, on Aug. 30, to play Fernando’s Pub on Bernard Avenue.
