To hear the fully produced piece, including samples of Myriam Gendron's music referred to in the text below, hit the play button above.
Gendron’s appearance at the Clark Art Institute comes two weeks before the release of her third album, “Mayday.”
“It doesn't have a strong concept like the two first records," she told WAMC. "So, the first one was Dorothy Parker poems put into music, and the second one was around traditional music. Now, this third one is kind of digging into traditional music, but really my melodies and my words. I'm just using other people's work to express myself in the two first records, whereas this one, I do a bit less of that. And it's really a record that was made during a very, very difficult time of my life, and so I don't know, it's hard for me to really talk about it. I, yeah- I don't have the distance yet. I'm very insecure about it, actually. I don't know if people will like it. But it- I think it just needed to come out. And we'll see. We'll see where it leads me."
“Mayday,” which features accompaniment from guitarist Marisa Anderson and drummer Jim White as well as a cadre of guest musicians, was produced after the death of Gendron’s mother.
“it's not just about my grief," said the singer-songwriter. "What I'm trying to do is use my own experience to express something universal- And I guess that's always what you try to do when you make a work of art, so it's nothing special, really. But I guess my own experience doesn't really matter in a way, because everyone struggles with loss, even if they haven't lost anyone in terms of like someone dying. But everyone's lost something. Sometimes you don't even know what it is, but you feel it, that you're missing something.”
Gendron says “transmission” is one of the key themes of the album.
“It's something that I've been thinking a lot about in the past few years," she told WAMC. "I lost my mother, and now I'm a mother, and I'm- So in this record, I'm both talking as a daughter and as a mother, so it's all there. And how does one inform the other? It's an interesting thing. I mean, I don't have answers, really. But it's something I think a lot about, and I think it's very, very present in that new record: Transmission.”
The core tension of “Mayday” comes from the temporal flux of confronting the past while dreaming of the future.
“Folk music in the strong sense of the word to me is music made by the people and for the people," said Gendron. "And so, it's not just an acoustic guitar and voice. That's not what it should mean. I think what it means is that you dig in kind of a common heritage, something that everyone- You talk about things that everyone shares, and you kind of, I guess, reorganize what's been done before to make it meaningful today. So it's not about looking behind to me. When I use these very, very old songs, the idea is not to say that things were better before. It's just to use the songs to talk about the world today, because they can still talk about- I mean, if they've traveled so far, it's because they speak through time, and you just have to adapt them a little to make them resonate in today's world, in the here and the now.”
Gendron says her approach to making music remains guided by intuition.
“I like to adopt a position of arts and crafts," she explained to WAMC. "I don't really know what I'm doing. And it's true, I don't! I'm always searching. It's not like I know what I'm doing. When I'm writing a song, I usually think I'll never make it. I don't feel like I'm a professional at all. I don't know if I'll ever feel like that. I don't know if anyone feels like a professional when they're creating something. I don't know. But for me, it's kind of a way of saying, I'm just like you guys, I struggle. Like, everyone struggles, and I don't want to act like I don't want to pretend like this is easy. And it's always- Yeah, it's about searching. Every song is about, I'm trying to search, I'm searching for something, and maybe it shows in the way that I write that I want to highlight that part of the process, saying I don't have it figured out. I don't have any anything to teach you really. All I can do is search and stretch out a hand, I guess.”
“Mayday” by Myriam Gendron will be released by Feeding Tube Records and Thrill Jockey on May 10th. She performs at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown tonight at 7, presented in collaboration with Belltower Records of North Adams.
Singer-songwriter P.G. Six opens.
