Basia Bulat: bright lights, tall shadows

She recently performed a live version of Gram Parsons’ “Hickory Wind” with Emmylou Harris and Trixie Whitley at the Greenbelt Harvest Picnic festival, but Basia Bulat is coming to Brussels to present her own album, Tall Tall Shadow, a sparkling blend of folk and pop. “Without light, there is no shadow.”

Basia Bulat is from Etobicoke, “a fancy way of saying West Toronto”, where Al Spx alias Cold Specks also grew up. Her name might sound Turkish, but she has Polish roots. “I’m a typical child of the first generation of immigrants, a hyphen between my homeland and my roots,” says Bulat. “I was eighteen before I went to Poland for the first time. But now that I’m an artist, I go there more often. The people there are really nice and they’re very tolerant of my lousy Polish. It’s atrocious!” [Laughs]

Bulat took music in with her mother’s milk: her mother was a music teacher. “I started to play the piano when I was three; so did my brother. We have been playing music together all our lives and he is now the percussionist in my band. For us, music was as logical as eating, drinking, and sleeping.” So a life as a musician was the logical step? “I actually tried to do everything to not be a musician, but the more I tried to run away from it, the more it pulled me back. I studied literature at university. But my friends kept on encouraging me. They went and booked me a show, so I had no choice. In the end, I used some of the money from my grant to make my first album.” [Laughs] Tall Tall Shadow, her third album, recorded with Arcade Fire’s bassist Tim Kingsbury and their sound engineer Mark Lawson, is a reaction to the sudden death of a good friend. “She was like a sister to me. After her death I started to look at my life differently. I threw the songs I had written in the bin. They didn’t match what I felt.” Lawson encouraged Bulat to set the lyrics as directly as possible to music. “The songs are less ornamented than before. I wanted to be as honest as possible, to make something beautiful without it being just pretty. Life is full of contradictions: you can’t get dark shadows without bright light.”

Bulat likes to play unfamiliar instruments such as the autoharp, a zither-like stringed instrument. “I had picked one up by chance at a garage sale. Fantastic instrument. Sonically, it has a big range, with its 36 strings. It can sound bright and sparkly, but also scrubby and down to earth. These days I like putting it through some effect boxes. I find it a lovely hybrid between the old world and the new. As a singer-songwriter you join a particular tradition, but you also want to fuck with it.” Isn’t it mainly played by strong women such as June Carter, Janis Joplin, and, more recently, PJ Harvey? “Well, Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear has one too. And then there is Washington Phillips, an old blues singer with a double instrument. [Shows a photo on her iPhone] He is the Jimmy Page of the autoharp.” [Laughs]

On Tall Tall Shadow Bulat falls back more on the piano, but she has also discovered the charango, a South American stringed instrument. “It makes you think in a different way; it makes you extend your boundaries. That’s always good. [Hands me her little guitar] Charango lessons with Basia Bulat. [I make a mess of trying to play it] Sounds avant-garde – lovely!”

Photo © Caroline Desiletshi

BASIA BULAT • 1/11, 19.30, €11/14, Botanique, Koningsstraat 236 rue Royale, Sint-Joost-ten-Node/Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, 02-218.37.32, www.botanique.be