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Jan.2, 2005 - Jan.9, 2005 |
Warren's Beautiful Ruins
Toronto poet turned songwriter releases second album
By Kerry Doole
Originally Published: 2004-01-25
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."
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