Honesty and reality are integral to the music of Ash and Bloom.
With a gentle approach reminiscent of Simon and Garfunkel, Matt McKenna and James Bloemendal sing songs of life.
“Honesty is crucial in our songs; when they lack honesty, they don’t work,” insists McKenna, noting the duo puts things people often have difficulty speaking about into the songs they sing. “We want to make music that comes from us, but also touches people; music that maybe gives people words to cope with what they’re dealing with.”
McKenna says the duo’s aim is to have listeners say, “Oh my gosh, you’re singing my life.”
McKenna and Bloemendal were surrounded by music as they grew up and since their meeting almost a decade ago, they have been collaborating and performing.
Salmon Arm was one of the favourite stops on the duo’s tour with Justin Hines last year. This solo tour marks the release of their new album, Let the Storm Come, which features songs co-written by some of Canada’s greats.
To write the album, McKenna and Bloemendal took their band, engineers and producers to a cottage in northern Ontario.
“We were there to work,” says McKenna of the beautiful, inspiring peace and quiet.
Used to working in Toronto studios where artists pay by the hour to record, finding inspiration can be tough under the pressures of time and cost.
“We were able to take our time – a whole week – and not worry about watching the clock; if inspiration hits at 1 a.m. or 2 p.m., or in the evening, that’s when we recorded,” he says. “We ended up with a bunch of weird sounds that we never would have got.”
In one experiment, they took all the low strings of a 12-string guitar and treated it like a hammer dulcimer. They didn’t have one, so they taped straws together and as Bloemendal would lie down and do the chords with his left hand, McKenna would stand over him banging out the rhythm.
“It was a very gentle sound but it didn’t sound like we wanted,” he says. “The sound folks said play it backwards so, on a song called Manna for My Soul, we got a weird sound that feels like my ear hadn’t heard before.”
McKenna says the fact of the matter is, they got a lot of new sounds from just playing and experimenting.
“It was maybe the most fun any of us has had recording an album,” he says, noting just being able to make the music when they wanted reminded them of why they wanted to be musicians in the first place. That magic infuses Let The Storm Come, which, at the producer’s suggestion was recorded by the musicians sitting in a circle, with only the glow of tea lights and a glass of wine.
“It was the purest music – something you can hold onto for the rest of your life,” says McKenna. “We knew as soon as we started that that’s how we had to do it and nobody wanted the music to end.”
McKenna and Bloemendal wrote 400 songs for this album, narrowing it down to 12 at the cottage.
Ash & Bloom appear at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 6 at the Wicked Spoon before taking their tour throughout North America and Australia until 2015.
