Turning Outrage Into Rhyme
article by Roddy Campbell
Evalyn Parry grew up in a household surrounded by traditional music. She remembers how cool it seemed listening to Stan Rogers singing with her dad’s band, The Friends of Fiddlers Green. Now she too breathes new life into the folk tradition with her politics and passion. Roddy Campbell catches her in a moment of rare respite.
She doesn’t do things by halves, does Evalyn Parry. Actor. Performance poet. Impresario. Youth counsellor. Gay activist. Oh yes, and did I mention she also sings the odd folk song when not at lunch with Bono and The Edge.
Now there’s a great story to start us rolling.
You see, Evalyn’s younger brother, Richard Reed Parry, plays a variety of instruments with Montreal’s brilliant Arcade Fire. Sis’ and bro’ were meeting for lunch prior to his band opening for U2 at the Montreal Forum. As it turns out, both bands were in the out-of-the-way restaurant where the pair had agreed to meet.
“Well, that was surreal,” says Evalyn. “What do you say, ‘Hi, The Edge’ (she laughs). I was sort of in on the tail end of the dinner. I more or less just got to shake hands with everybody and off we all went.”
So. I was telling you about what a busy bee Evalyn Parry is, wasn’t I. Well, she recently released not only a new double CD, Small Theatres, but also a DVD, Live at Lula, and a powerful single, 14 (For December 6) – her first new recordings since making Unreasonable in 2003. And if that appears like a flurry of sudden activity, these projects have been ongoing for several years, apparently.
“The thing with me is that I’m always doing 7,000 projects at once. I’m a bit of a chronic multi-tasker and have trouble saying no to exciting new creative projects. I have a theatre company [Independent Aunties] here in Toronto. Suddenly, last year, we had all this production stuff going on and so my CD recording had to get squished in between my rehearsal blocks and my performing theatre stuff. Anyways, it all just took a little while to get finished.”
Small Theatres separates into Songs on one disc and Spoken Word on the other. Her poetry – poignant, scathing, nostalgic, flippant and often fabulously funny – tackles subjects as diverse as puppy love (Love In The Greater Toronto Area Takes Public Transportation) and the pleasures of her favourite novel, Anne of Green Gables (The Anne In My Mind).
There’s also Once In A Blue Moon about an afternoon of deliberation in a coffee shop where the waitresses discuss the merits of Ani DiFranco albums. And yes, Ani’s confessional frankness and passionate politicized voice, as well as her ability to chart her own successful independent musical course without compromise, has provided inspiration for Parry.
“She has made a mark on a generation that is very unique. I think that for a young woman of my generation, that plays acoustic music, to deny her as an influence would be like denying Bob Dylan’s influence on singer-songwriters.”
A powerful social and political commentator in her own right, Parry brilliantly takes to task the billion-dollar bottled water industry and its ability to convince the public that tap water, used for decades, is now no good.
‘We’re swallowing the idea that good water isn’t free/That of course one must pay for water of quality.’ So goes Bottle This!
But it’s the confrontational yet uplifting 14 (For December 6) – a commemoration for the 14 female students at Montreal’s l’École Polytechnique gunned down by the psychopath Marc Lepine in1989 – that really sparks emotions. Released as a single to coincide with the massacre’s anniversary, it received radio play throughout the country.
“I’ve had some fantastic responses to it. I’ve made an effort to get it out to universities, to people teaching women’s studies. Part of the motivation was this feeling that that date and that event had been largely forgotten in a younger generation. It’s not something that impacts younger women in the way that it impacted me as a young woman. [I wanted] to connect that with the way that gender and inequality still exist so profoundly in the world. And how that event, and that date, can serve as a reminder and point of connection in Canadian history.”
Evalyn Parry was raised as a Quaker. One of their core values is social justice for the persecuted and underprivileged. Her American mom, the poet Caroline Parry, often took her to peace marches and women’s rights rallies at a very young age. The die was cast. In more ways than one, it seems. Poetry gives Parry her political voice.
“There’s such a satisfaction as a writer to turn outrage into rhyme,”she says. “There’s something about that simple act that is so satisfying. Because of a double entendre, or because of a turn of phrase that turns an idea into a metaphor, that sort of creativity and transformation of idea into art I find very satisfying as both a creator and a performer. People really respond to it. It makes people excited to hear ideas that they’ve thought about but not in the form of a news report or a newsletter or a lecture. To be able to tap your foot and snap along makes the medicine go down.”
Now, Parry also plays guitar and concertina, writes her own songs and interprets from the tradition. Hardly your introverted, it’s-all-about-me, garden variety singer-songwriter, our Evalyn. Which is not surprising, really. Her English dad was the late David Parry of Friends of Fiddlers Green – Toronto’s flagbearers for traditional music since the late ’60s and a source of inspiration for the likes of both Stan and Garnet Rogers.
Evalyn still plays her dad’s concertina and his influence on Small Theatres and Live At Lula appears on such tracks as The Gay Rover and Lady Margaret. The former is a clever contemporary reworking of The Wild Rover, and the latter a sparse, dramatic version learned from the singing of England’s Frankie Armstrong.
“It was in our family record collection. And when I was maybe 12 or 13 I just became obsessed with it. She just has such a wild, wonderful voice. That song just stayed with me. The tune haunts me. It makes me upset. I find [myself] being slightly terrified and totally compelled at the same time.”
Attending folk festivals as a nipper, and being surrounded by traditional music in the house, Evalyn grew up on a staple diet of sea shanties, ballads and big, bruising chorus songs. Although the music she now writes doesn’t necessarily come from the tradition, “it steals from it and is inspired by it, absolutely.”And as for those formative summers being dragged around from folk festival to folk festival as a daughter of a Friend?
“ I have a really distinct memory of the Friends singing with Stan Rogers at Summerfolk. And I remember as a kid how, before you turn into a teenager and feel so embarrassed by the fact that your parents are into folk music, you still think it’s cool. Then, you think it’s supercool your parents know Stan Rogers. I remember being really impressed when I learned Stan had written Barrett’s Privateers inspired by a Friends concert.”
Joni Mitchell, Dar Williams, Nancy White, Connie Kaldor and Ferron all made an initial impact on Evalyn’s songwriting. And like Ferron, Parry is gay, or, as she insists, “queer.”
“[Queer] appeals to me because it sort of reclaims that notion of‘outsider/otherness’ and feels like it describes something about my life that is not just about my sexual orientation. I’m someone who is drawn to fringe politics and a lifestyle that is not in keeping with the status quo.”
Obviously her material reflects her sexuality, with, it must be said, both humour and grace. However, of all the songs on Small Theatres, the moving true drama of Sailor appears to have the most legs – thanks in part to Shelagh Rogers of CBC’s Sounds Like Canada and her efforts to track down and find the song’s main character. As it turns out, he is a cook on a cargo boat that sails Lake Superior who met Evalyn in a parking lot in Sault Ste. Marie minutes prior to a gig. While initially irritated buy the interruption to her pre-concert reverie, she was immediately captivated by his moving story.
“He just launched into telling me about his life and I was completely drawn in. He told me this miraculous story about how he was diagnosed with cancer and was supposed to have less than a year to live and here he still was. Then he told me of how, just a few weeks back, on the anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, he had been on the spot where it sank. It was this chilling moment where the captain rang the bell 29 times for the [drowned] men and he felt the passing of all of those spirits and felt his own mortality.”
Evalyn was born in Victoria, BC, in 1973. Her dad met her mum while travelling in India. When they moved to Canada, he began his graduate studies in medieval theatre. David Parry completed his doctoral thesis in Toronto where he ran the PLS theatre company, staging pageants and mummers plays when not gallivanting across the country with the Friends of Fiddlers Green.
Evalyn grew up in Toronto and by her own admission, she was a “bossy, nerdy”child who loved performing in front of an audience. She took up the flute and the recorder in school but drifted towards the guitar at the end of her undergraduate degree in theatre at Montreal’s Concordia University. While she has dabbled in poetry since a teenager, Montreal had a healthy spoken-word scene which drew her in immediately. Upon graduating she returned to Toronto to pursue a life in theatre but continued writing songs and spinning rhymes. She now owns her own theatre company and runs programs for troubled “queer identified youth”at Buddies And Bad Times Theatre.
It took until 2001 before she released her debut disc, Things That Should Be Warnings. And like all her subsequent recordings it featured a combination of songs and spoken word. Unreasonable followed two years later and sparked a real buzz. “A gorgeous feast of words and music,”wrote Penguin Eggs’ Tom Metuzals. It featured a number of key tracks, including Always, a hilarious tribute to tampons, and The Stone And The Bumblee, which won the inaugural Ontario Council of Folk Festivals’ prestigious Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award.
Toronto master multi-instrumentalist Ken Whiteley handled production duties and plays a huge musical role in her latest recordings, along with Suzie Vinnick (bass), Anne Lindsay (fiddle) and Brad Hart (drums). Whiteley produced her father’s records and Evalyn used to babysit Whiteley’s son.
And just to complete the circle, Unreasonable, Live At Lula and Small Theatres are all released on the Borealis label, which is partially owned by Whiteley and Friends of Fiddlers Green piper Grit Laskin. Indeed, you can see her dad’s old colleagues, Tam Cairney and Laskin, sitting in the audience, clearly enjoying themselves, on Live From Lula.
“They’re great people that run the label and have been so supportive of what I’ve been doing. I sort of thought at first,‘Really, you guys want me? Am I not a little bit outside the lines of what you guys do?’ I think they were excited about the ways that I pushed at the boundaries of the folk tradition. It felt like an interesting way to kind of honour my roots and have more exposure for my stuff with this nice, legitimate folk label.”
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