The heart of indie-folk music has always resonated with Great Lake Swimmers vocalist/guitarist Tony Dekker. Dekker says the spirit of the music is real and that it captured what he felt on the inside once he started looking into his musical creative process.
“I’ve been through—as everyone kind of does—different phases of their life where different kinds of music make sense to them, and for me, it wasn’t always folk music,” says Dekker. “When I started taking songwriting a little bit more seriously, that folk music was the music that I really felt in my bones.”
And just as people go through many different phases of life, Dekker says there are many ways to write songs; he says that there are as many ways as there are songs.
“If a melody comes to you, you have to give it the attention, and try to document it, and make use of that spark when you get it,” he says. “Sometimes it starts with a melody; sometimes it can start with just a rhythmic thing.”
Regardless of how Dekker turns his creative spark into fire, he gives the lyrics to the songs just as much—if not more—attention than the music. “The Talking Wind”—the leadoff track on the band’s new album The Waves, the Wake—is an example of this, says Dekker, with the words heavily influenced by the music.
“[‘The Talking Wind’] is a song that essentially has the wind as its subject. I thought that since we were branching out instrumentation-wise that it would be really interesting to see what we could do if we had a woodwind ensemble doing the tracks for the song, being a song about the wind,” says Dekker. “It was a nice synchronicity between the lyrics and the instrumentation.”
Dekker, who is making a conscious effort to be open to more ways of writing songs, plays guitar, but in the video for “The Talking Wind,” things were done a little differently—he is standing guitarless in a church, with an ensemble of singers behind him. There’s a reason churches are significant for the band: they recorded the new album in one. The church, says Dekker, was an ideal place to record.
“Each album, there’s been location recordings in different places,” he says. “That’s to try to sort of make a map of the sound a little bit, and sort of document the place a little bit as much as we’re documenting the music itself.”
Throughout all seven of the band’s albums, they have chosen acoustically significant places to record in. For example, the band’s last album, A Forest of Arms, was recorded in a cave in Ontario.
“It was a really challenging and interesting experience and, I think, added a layer of atmosphere into what we were doing as a group with that album,” says Dekker. “It was dark, and cold, and wet. I had been looking for something like that, a natural cavern to record in, for some time.”
Dekker sees the process of touring as a way to carry on the dialogue brought up in the album. And they’ll be taking that talk overseas soon: they’ve just been given the green light for a European tour.
“The live performances have always been an important part of continuing the conversation with people that you start when you release the album,” says Dekker. “I feel like you start the conversation and playing live is a way of continuing it with people. From an artistic standpoint, it’s just as important now as it ever was.”
Great Lake Swimmers
8 pm Thursday, September 20
$24, Capital Ballroom
sugarnightclub.ca