Hannah Georgas w/Petra Glynt Friday, October 21, 11pm The Carleton, 1685 Argyle Street $15
w/Basia Bulat, Schmeids Puls Saturday, October 22, 8pm The Marquee Club, 2037 Gottingen Street $25
“I heard somebody say this quote that resonated with me for some reason,” says Hannah Georgas. “‘When you turn on a tap for the first time that hasn’t been turned on in a long time, it comes out a bit murky, but if you let it run for awhile, it becomes clear.'”
She’s using this apt metaphor to describe the process of writing her third album, For Evelyn, songs that fell out of her across six months, after more than two years on the road in support of 2012’s Hannah Georgas.
“I was trying to make a habit of giving it something every day,” she says from her Toronto home. “The very first song on the album—I had been working on another idea all day and feeling like I wasn’t going to keep anything. But then ‘Rideback,’ I wrote that in half an hour. It came out as a product of something else in half an hour. It just kind of happens in weird ways. But if you’re doing it, and you keep doing it, something happens.”
For Evelyn, named in honour of her grandmother, is certainly the darkest of Georgas’ three-album catalogue, sonically and lyrically, with Holy Fuck’s Graham Walsh handling most of the production duties. Before recording she had ended a relationship, and during recording she pulled up stakes and moved to Toronto permanently, after a dozen years in Vancouver. “I’m trying so hard to make a new start / But when I wake up, I don’t get very far,” she sings on “Lost Cause.” “Tell me that I’m something worth your while,” she implores on “Waste.”
“Transition and uncertainty,” she says now, “were definitely in my mind when I was writing.”
Her two Pop Explosion shows are part of a six-week tour, the first major run for this record and her first Halifax visit in awhile. “It’s been at least two years,” she says. “I’m really excited.”
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2016.