Warren's Beautiful Ruins

Toronto poet turned songwriter releases second album

His name may not yet have registered in the general public consciousness, but Toronto singer/songwriter Chris Warren can certainly boast peer respect. "I find his music and lyrical outlook consistently refreshing and inspiring," notes Ron Sexsmith. Mary Margaret O'Hara called Warren's first album, Crazy Wisdom, "cool, funny, and with amazing words and alternately smooth and surprising musical arrangements."
With any justice, Warren's work will now find a wider audience, as he has just released a praiseworthy second CD, Beautiful Ruins. When Tandem sat down with him over beers in Parkdale recently, Chris explained the reasons for the late appearance of the disc, out seven years after Crazy Wisdom.
"After the first one, I stopped for a while. I changed direction and went back to fiction writing, which is where I had started. I had put a lot of effort into music for two years, but then I felt a calling to get back to literature."
The desire to create songs again returned gradually. "I do work in a painfully slow way generating songs, and then there was the technological crossover. I started using home recording equipment, and it took a little while to get used to that. The actual recording of Beautiful Ruins was about two years in the making, just doing bed tracks here and there."
The self-produced, home-recorded album is far from minimal or lo-fi in its production, however. Warren's arrangements are often sophisticated, and such instruments as bassoon, trumpet, french horn and flugelhorn are subtly incorporated into the basic guitar/bass/drums format. Such top local players as Maury Lafoy (Starling), Tom Bona (Sue Foley), Jeff Burke and Sarah McElcheran are used to good effect.
"The two albums were produced in quite different ways," says Warren. "The first one was a pretty conscious production effort. I was working with James Paul at The Rogue, and in some ways it was a lot bigger and more ambitious than the new one. I think Crazy Wisdom was perhaps less focused than this one in terms of genre. It had jazz and world music sounds, all within a pop context but somehow more amorphous."
Warren's music remains difficult to pigeonhole. His press bio refers to "an incomparable mix of Costello and Kierkegaard, Dylan and doorway graffiti," but that still doesn't do him full justice. Chris doesn't mind the 'adult pop' tag, though that sometimes has negative connotations. Some songs have a folk feel, reflecting the now distant days he played Annex folk club Fat Albert's alongside peers like Sexsmith, Bob Snider and Kyp Harness. Other tunes have a more contemporary rock and pop vibe.
Giving Warren's work true distinctiveness, however, is its poetic sensibility. He has long been a published poet, and his song lyrics can be read as such. Such imagery as "intolerable pain cracks your face like lightning over a clear night sky" ("Memory Is Water") is definitely a cut above your average pop lyric, that's for sure.
Songs on Beautiful Ruins are inspired by subjects as diverse as an aging cat ("Yaffa's In Her Twilight Years"), a dead junkie rocker ("Dubious Elegy"), and man's inhumanity to other species ("All Of You Hairless Apes," "Thanks...And Sorry").
Does he approach writing a poem or a lyric differently? "In my mind, a poem is a song. The Hebrew word for both is the same, though when I'm writing a poem I find there is a different kind of melody going on. In writing songs, I am melody driven. Lately I've been finding that the words come after. On the song 'Simple Child,' I finalized the lyrics and recorded the vocals on the same day we mixed the song."
Even though he is about to publish a new collection of poetry, House On Fire, Warren confesses that "I haven't written a poem for a while. Poetry for me became more a failure to communicate. It is hard to visualize whom it is reaching, whereas there is an instant gratification in playing music live. It is so much more immediate."
Beautiful Ruins is released on Urban Myth Recordings, a label founded by Chris and fellow pop maverick Dan Bryk. In fact, Bryk covered an early Warren song, "Graveyard Of Friends," on the Japanese edition of his cult classic, Lover's Leap. Reports of Warren's serious talent are not urban myths, though. They're for real.
Beautiful Ruins is now out. Log onto www.chriswarren.cc for more information. Chris Warren plays a CD release party at The Rivoli on Feb. 11.

Publication Date: 2004-01-25
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3571