Utilising The 'Broken Wheel' Approach

The city of Edmonton in the Canadian province of Alberta is currently making much of “revitalising” the inner city suburb of McCauley.

It’s a place singer, songwriter and pianist Ann Vriend has got to know very well the past six or seven years she’s chosen to live there, and it informs her latest album For The People In The Mean Time.

“In my particular neighbourhood there are a lot of people living on the streets,” Vriend explains, “and so my attic and my studio have a good view of my back alley where there are constant ‘goings on’ of various things, most of which are illegal [chuckles]. So because of all that I guess I saw a rougher edge to society than maybe you do normally when you’re living in a privileged country like Australia or Canada.

"There are constant ‘goings on’ of various things, most of which are illegal."

“At the same time, you know, politically and just what’s going on in the news, I just sort of thought there’s a lot of tension and hardship and harsh things out there right now, whether it’s in my little neighbourhood, in my alley, being played out in front of my eyes or things on the political level, personal to those people, so the whole album is sort of about tough stories. But the music I wanted to have be really upbeat and danceable and fun and groovy so that those tough tales wouldn’t sound just really, really depressing!” 

Vriend produced her 2011 album, Love & Other Messes, herself but chose to call in Toronto producer Tino Zolfo for her latest.

“Well I learned that I don’t know that much about producing,” she admits, chuckling again. “I learned a lot, I’ll say that. That was a good experience and I don’t think I did an awful job, but, especially for the genre I was doing and the drums and programming end of things, I’m the last person in the world that should be trying computer-related anything. This guy [Zolfo], just in terms of having a lot of knowledge about that genre, was a bass player in soul bands for a long time in Canada and I thought I could really benefit from what he brought to the table.

“He also has a quirky style of producing in terms of making things sort of pop but not mainstream middle-of-the-road pop. So for me, I wanted to see if I could synthesise old-school soul with ‘now’ pop without the ‘now’ pop being the kind of ‘now’ pop that I don’t like!”

Zolfo co-wrote four of the songs on For The People… with Vriend, but more interestingly, he also gave the record quite a distinctive sound.

“Just to put some grit and noise into what was recorded digitally, to get at a feeling of not being so new and shiny, there’s actually, in every song there’s something functioning as what he calls a noise track. He calls it the broken wheel approach!”