Sarah Slean

January, 2005


Two years ago, singer songwriter Sarah Slean was having a bad year. Although with her solo debut release on Atlantic Records, she had been accepted by the Canadian and American music industries, she wasn’t so sure about them. In fact she wasn’t so thrilled about what she did for a living, period. “I didn’t believe in this as an occupation any more” she says earnestly. “I thought it was grotesque in its vanity and its self indulgence. I thought, ‘my God - why am I an artist? Why am I not using my brain and heart to help cure sick people or do something of worth?’ I completely turned on this as a way of life.”

So in July of 2003, Slean pretty much dropped everything and headed up north for a self-imposed four month sabattical. “I gave away most of my shit, or I just left it in my apartment” she explains. “I got movers to put my piano in the back of a truck and up I drove with just the essentials. I had no idea of what the place was that I had picked. I had never seen it before.”

Slean spent the days just staring at the trees, reading, writing and just thinking. “I would wake up with the sun and go to bed when it got dark” she recalls. “I felt like I went up there with all of these questions and no answers were coming in. It was a last ditch attempt. And I was pleasantly surprised that it was not like that at all. All of the answers were there but in ways that I didn’t expect.”

It should be made clear that although Slean ended up spending four months in the woods in northeastern Ontario, the retreat as planned didn’t have an end date. Slean was going to stay up there for as long as she felt it was necessary. But there always was the notion that she might never want to return to her life. “I had those fears” she gulps. “I knew that it wouldn’t be a good thing if I went there and stayed forever. Because I think you have to go back to the world and tell the story. It’s like Homer and ‘The Odyssey’.

So when Slean returned to the world in the fall of 2003, she was a changed person. “It was just like I was unclenched” she laughs. “The permanent pain in my neck was gone. All of these things that were so much struggle, and so much conflict and striving and desire and all of those really antagonizing forces. They just vanished. I didn’t have it in me. I didn’t have anything to rail against. I didn’t have a face looking back at me. I just had this beautiful blank slate of nature. It was such a lesson to me.”

Refreshed and reinspired she then recorded her second album not insignificantly titled ‘Day One’ which was released this past fall. She also published ‘Raven’ a book of the paintings she did in the cabin during her self-imposed sabattical. “When I was in the cabin I was becoming acquainted with how I wanted to create an artwork that I could finish in one sitting” she says. “I was making lots and lots of them. I thought I should put out the book as a sort of memory of the time I spent at the cabin.”

And then she became the ‘Black Widow’. Canadian film Director David Norton was casting about for someone to play the lead role in a cinematic telling of the story of Eve Hardwicke who murdered her husband and child in Hamilton some fifty years ago. Norton’s friend, musician Hawksley Workman remembered his friend Slean and one audition later, she had the part. “I was terrified and I said to them ‘hey you know I don’t know how to act, eh??’” she chuckles. “I mean I acted in plays in high school and I loved it but I wouldn’t consider myself an actress!”

The film ‘Black Widow’ comes out later this year and despite her initial reticence, Slean is excited. ”I’ve got the bug now” she laughs “I’m hoping that when it gets released I start getting some calls about some more parts!”

In the immediate future however its back to touring, her current trek finding her paired with rising songwriter Jeremy Fisher on a tour that stops in London on February ??. But despite her four month retreat, Sarah Slean still struggles to ensure that her work has meaning for her. “It’s an everyday struggle” she shrugs. “People think I’m being dramatic, but its just part of the way I think. Everyday I have to come back to not hating it because I think it’s superficial.” She pauses for a moment and then adds “I have to find its nobility in it somewhere, every single day or it’s too much to me.”