Talia Schlanger.Katherine Holland/Supplied
The grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the microphone.
In 2019, Talia Schlanger stepped down as host of World Cafe, a syndicated indie-music radio program distributed by National Public Radio and produced by Philadelphia’s WXPN. In her mid-30s, she had decided to write and record her first album. By then she had years of experience working in public radio on both sides of the border – so one might think the Toronto native would have racked up a lot of know-how on making and marketing a record.
One would be wrong.
“I really felt clueless,” says Schlanger, a graduate of Toronto Metropolitan University’s radio and television arts program and a past host of CBC Radio 2′s Weekend Mornings and the television series CBC Music: Backstage.
The album, Grace for the Going, drops Feb. 2. Exiling herself in Paris, Schlanger wrote songs on an 80-year-old French acoustic guitar – “I scoured the city’s second-hand stores” – that came with a label inside that read “folk-rock chic.” That description could serve as the record’s genre.
The nine tracks are twinkled and sometimes waltzed; woodwinds, strings and soft brass often appear. Relaxed melodies serve as invitations to Schlanger’s elegant storytelling and lullabies for grown-ups. Songs about faith, isolation, narrow bridges and vanishing voices are sung with the crystal-clear sincerity of a seasoned stage-musical performer. (Schlanger has appeared in Mamma Mia, Queen’s We Will Rock You and Green Day’s American Idiot.)
Related listening? The Sarah Harmer/Sarah Slean crowd now has a third habit.
A beaming Schlanger recently posted a video of herself opening a box of Grace for the Going vinyl. And while her Christmas morning elation marked a culmination of a dream project, the job for the neophyte artist is in many ways just beginning. Her journey thus far serves as a case study on how a microbudget debut comes to be.
The Making
Schlanger started from scratch. “Some of the emotions and ideas and sentence fragments have been kicking around for a long time, and while there was a song here and there that I’d written over the years, none of them made it on the album,” she says. “I hadn’t given myself a chance to take it seriously before.”
After a five-month “songwriting bender” in Europe in the fall of 2019, she came back to Toronto with material she felt was ready to record. Just one of the songs (The endLing) made it onto Grace for the Going; everything else was rewritten and edited with help from guitarist Kevin Breit and the album’s producer/engineer/masterer, David Travers-Smith.
“The degree of change to the songs was substantial,” says Travers-Smith, whose past clients include Veda Hille, the Wailin’ Jennys and Schlanger’s cousin Soozi Schlanger. “A lot of this was Talia getting her footing with making a record.”
Schlanger had met Travers-Smith about 10 years earlier at a party (they washed dishes together). Reconnecting a decade later, she played him a song on her acoustic guitar in a park, socially distanced according to COVID-19 guidelines at the time. “He came aboard hard,” she says. “He was in it to help me find my voice.”
Because of the pandemic, a lot of the recording at Travers-Smith’s Toronto studio was done remotely. Much of the guitar work and arrangements were handled by Breit, who previously worked with Norah Jones and jazzer Cassandra Williams.
“Talia’s material is very lyrical, which is telling you something,” Breit says. “It’s pretty heady stuff, and if you’re paying attention, the song is letting you know what it needs.”
A Canada Council grant covered about two-thirds of the cost of musicians, recording, manufacturing the record and a bit of promotion. “I covered the rest of the cost from my savings,” Schlanger says.
The Record Label
Schlanger sent the finished album to a variety of independent labels, but the eventual deal came together in kismet fashion when Skydiggers drummer Noel Webb passed on a couple of live clips of Schlanger and Breit to the Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins. Intrigued, Timmins contacted Schlanger, who then sent him Grace for the Going.
“I thought that the album had a real beauty and mystery to it and I loved her voice and writing,” Timmins recalls.
Timmins and the Junkies own and operate Toronto’s Latent Recordings. Though it is a small operation mostly devoted to the band’s concerns, the label’s roster include such rootsy artists as Jerry Leger, the Skydiggers and Tom Wilson’s Lee Harvey Osmond project.
Timmins and Latent provide support on the marketing side of things and with funding of the overall project through its affiliation with FACTOR, a non-profit organization funded by Canada’s private radio stations and the federal government.
Though signing with Latent made sense logistically, Schlanger’s decision came down to vibes: “It felt like a lucky, happy home for my music.”
The Music
The album’s lead single was Attention, a playful tune with a theatrical flourish. It was inspired by a self-obsessed romantic partner. That the track was recently featured on CBC Radio’s Q should surprise no one – Schlanger is a guest host on the network.
Other highlights include The endLing, a moody drama about things going the way of the dodo. Or, in this case, an endangered species of tree frog with a distinct call that is down to the last of its breed: “You are the endling, the ending of a sound.”
Right to Be is something of a tribute to Judee Sill, a largely forgotten Southern California singer-songwriter from the early 1970s whose tragic story is a feature film waiting to be made. Her only crime was that she was not as beautiful as fellow cult-music figures Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley – two photogenic artists more popular now than when they were alive, and much better known than Sill.
Schlanger is a fan of those semi-obscure artists and another one, Eva Cassidy, who also died young. “Some of my favourite people have not been able to have what you’d call a successful career,” she says, “but they’ve made music that has saved my life.”
The Road
As attractive as Schlanger’s debut album is, nobody is likely to get rich off it. “My music,” she acknowledges, “doesn’t sound like money.”
So, like most artists – first-timers and veterans alike – she’ll try to make a go of it on the road. She launches her album at TD Music Hall (at Toronto’s Massey Hall) on Feb. 15. The 37-year-old is currently putting together an East Coast tour, with a mix of solo gigs, duo shows, storytelling presentations and full band concerts. She says her music is “scalable,” which will no doubt please folk festival programmers who, as a rule, prize such versatility.
There is more to Schlanger’s commitment to concerts than a livelihood. She simply believes in it.
“We’re in such a fight for our physical, tangible, analog lives, with everything evaporating into zeroes and ones,” she explains. “The feeling of sharing vibrations with people in a room at a live show is the most meaningful thing in the world.”