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Don’t call me a comedian,” Meryn Cadell warns. “I
always correct people when ‘comedy’ gets said anywhere near me.” Two years
ago, the Toronto performance artist released an album titled Angel Food
for Thought. It consisted almost entirely of monologues — by turns
conversational, confessional, caustic, and, yes, comedic. But they were
monologues with a difference: no punch lines, no labored gags, but small
tales full of telling details and insights sometimes delivered over music,
mostly driven by the quirky rhythms of Cadell’s deadpan voice.
The first single, “The Sweater,” which recounts an
episode involving adolescent desire, societal norms, and misunderstanding,
all revolving around an item of knitwear, made the playlists of American
top-forty stations and, finally, just as it was fading after a long run in
the States, on commercial Canadian outlets.
Depending on your point of view, “The Sweater” was
either the unlikeliest hit in the history of recorded music or a pop
smart-bomb aimed straight at radio’s core demographic: “Girls... I know you
will understand this and feel the intrinsic, incredible emotion,” Cadell
begins the thread of her narrative about a girl who captures her favorite
boy’s sweater, a sweater exuding “that slightly goat-like smell which all
teenage boys possess.” When the boy turns out to be indifferent, the girl
learns a hard lesson in humiliation, a lesson reinforced by the story’s
I-should-have-known-all-along denouement: “The label in that sweater said
one-hundred-percent acrylic.” All this telescoped into pop-music time,
propelled by a chunky organ riff and drum groove that sound as though they
were salvaged from a generic go-go session time warp.
Cadell passed her own sweater years in Waterloo,
Ontario, wanting to be an actress. She spent a year studying dance in
Waterloo and a year studying film at York University before enrolling in the
Ontario College of Art, learning holography and performance art for academic
credit. At the same time, she was appearing on stage around the corner from
OCA at the Beverley Tavern, reading her monologues at weekly catch-all
evenings called Elvis Mondays. “For the first year I was at OCA I kept what
I was doing at school and what I was doing in the bars totally separate. I
was so clued out. I can’t believe I did that for a whole year,” she explains
in her loud-and-clear voice.
This fall, Meryn Cadell stared down the barrel of her
sophomore album. Bombazine was put together mostly with people she
first got to know at OCA, but she’s added some musical collaborators,
including k.d. lang’s co-composer Ben Mink. The title may sound like
something you might find on a dessert cart, but bombazine is actually black
fabric worn as a symbol of mourning. And that’s the way this record works:
it sounds confectionary — and parts are — but there’s also material for
mourning. The individual tracks — no sweaters this time, but gay marriages
and shoplifters — are more fully developed and more recognizable as pop
songs. The monologues are still there as interludes, studded throughout the
album: the titles are listed, but the words don’t turn up on the lyric
sheet. You have to listen.
Between her
deadpan delivery and her surprisingly versatile singing voice, Meryn
Cadell’s proved that there’s more to her than just girl talk. “My first
record company tried to pretend they discovered I could sing,” the
sweater girl says, falling into character: “‘She was only speaking until we
found her.’” |
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