Posted by andPOP Staff on November 26th, 2006

She might be spending the day in a posh Toronto hotel room, but Sarah Slean is no longer homeless in this city. After moving to Paris late last winter, the 29-year-old musician, artist and writer finally made her way back to Canadian shores in September. And while she’s known for her adventurous relocations (she wrote her last studio album, 2004′s “Day One,” over four months in a remote log cabin near Ottawa), Slean seems to be enjoying the comfort of home.

“I have a desire to stay here now, to stay put somewhere in life for a while,” she says. “And that’s daunting. I’m not really sure how I’m going to be able to do that. But it’s nice to be back in a city where you have a context, where you make sense in some way.”

Given that she once again has a bed to call her own in Toronto, Slean’s hotel stay today is mostly for practical reasons. She’s got a long list of interviews lined up in support of her latest musical offering, a compilation of live and studio recordings called “Orphan Music.” For the collection, Slean cherry-picked selections from live shows in December 2005 and hit the studio to create new songs and rework old ones, string section in tow. As she says it, the disc brings together “all the stragglers, all the pieces that never really got to see the light of day or that happened and vanished” — it gives the orphans a home.

She looks impossibly good for the mid-morning hour, especially given the fact that she was out late last night, drinking champagne at a house-warming party for a friend. Her make-up is flawless, her lightly curled tresses of brown hair fall easily, lightly, and her outfit is neat and sensible (well, maybe not the four-inch high platform boots). If this is Sarah Slean hung-over, she really should drink more often.

Though her fantastically blue eyes hold a near-constant expression of amazement, they light up particularly brightly on the topic of Paris. Living in the storied city had been a dream of hers since she was sixteen; it always took first or second spot on her “before I die…” lists. When it came time for her to live the classic Parisian experience — the romance, the culture, the mystique of the city — Slean wasn’t at all disappointed.

“There are so many closed doors in Paris,” she says. “Everything’s very clean and closed and perfect on the outside, but if you turn down a little corridor, you’ll find that there are just magic holes everywhere. And that just gave birth to a lot of music. The place that I was living was such a tiny little cube of space, but I rented a piano and I don’t think I’ve ever played so much in my life.”

But Slean says that her time in France wasn’t as much about finding artistic inspiration in the culture as it was about simply living freely. One day, for example, a Canadian friend called her from Spain; 24 hours later, she flew down for a visit. “The people I met there and the times I had there, good and bad, and the places I went…I think that’s what informs your music, your life does,” she says. “I think if you’re a culture nerd, which I was to a certain extent, you become inside that world so much that you music does not refer to life and does not echo in life and isn’t human anymore.”

Unfortunately, Slean had to face that approach to music head-on almost as soon as she arrived back in Canada. In an effort to ground herself firmly and spread some roots, she enrolled at the University of Toronto to finish off a degree in music and philosophy that she’d started at 19. She says that the academic approach to music drove her insane at first; she felt that over-analyzing music killed its beauty and diminished its magical spontaneity. But as she got further into her courses, Slean came to understand the greater purpose behind her studies.

“To be a true master, you take something and learn it so deeply that you lose your innocence towards it, that kind of childish naiveté that you have in the beginning,” she says. “And then you learn and learn and learn and learn to the point where you unlearn, and then, through your knowledge, you can go back to the naiveté about it. I guess that’s kind of my goal for music, because I’ve been studying it for so long. One day I’ll unlearn.”

And while school is Slean’s primary focus at the moment, she’s also setting her sights on a studio follow-up to “Day One.” But she’ll be taking a different approach this time. Slean says that, with “Day One,” she was pushing strongly for a particular sound, focusing heavily on a full band and her rock influences. Looking back now, she feels as though that focus came at the expense of her musical personality. “I don’t consider my last record a failure,” she explains, “but I listen to it now and I’m like, ‘Who’s that?’ — more so than when I listen to my first record.”

This time, Slean’s going with her instincts, letting her sonic whims take her where they may. “I think what my gut is telling me to do for my next record is to go to orchestral music, my first and greatest love,” she says, joking that her label, Warner, doesn’t share her enthusiasm for the idea. “The strings were the first thing that I think I remember hearing as a child. I remember being like, ‘What is that?’ just purely aesthetically. And then as you get older and you have stories and emotions and all that, I find that strings are the most moving sounds. I want to use that, and I want nothing to do with the sound of modern music today. It doesn’t speak to me at all.”

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