Odd future Lauren Mann and Company take new album over land and sea
by Christine Leonard
Lauren Mann & The Fairly Odd Folk
Ship & Anchor Pub April 10, 2013
There are few things more memorable than those childhood summers spent camping and exploring in the great outdoors. This is especially true for singer-songwriter Lauren Mann and her husband Zoltan Szoges, for whom the past few years have seemed like one extended (and occasionally strange) sleepaway vacation. Having polished off her curatorial collection of songs, Stories from Home, in 2010, Lauren took her partner’s encouragements to heart and set out on a coast-to-coast tour that would become a life-altering adventure.
“It was pretty crazy,” Mann recounts. “When I look back now, I can’t believe we actually did it. It was an incredibly big thing for us to see Canada and meet people from across the country. We teamed up with various transient band members along the road to form an ever-evolving troupe that went all the way to Newfoundland.”
Pages of rhyme continued to accumulate as the kilometres whizzed by, as Mann’s keen eye and quick hand captured her impressions along the way. The finger-snapping folk-pop of her piano keys has always reverberated with colour and joy, but now they also benefit from the grassroots gusto of The Fairly Odd Folk.
Besides initiating her manager-husband in the ways of the keyboard, drums and glockenspiel, Mann has recruited guitarist Josh Akin and another talented married duo, drummer/guitarist Jay Christman and bassist/vocalist Jessica Christman, to fill out her musical retinue. Intensified and electrified, the alt-folk ensemble looks forward to debuting Over Land and Sea, Mann’s latest batch of wildly illustrative campfire tales.
“I’ve been writing the songs on Over Land and Sea for a couple of summers; it’s been a long process,” she says. “Zoltan has remained the visionary behind the music; we are each other’s muses. I was very grateful to be able to take the songs down to Florida to record them with him and work with our wonderful producer Aaron Marsh. The band’s current lineup has been going steady since last fall, and now we’re really comfortable feeding off of each others’ ideas. I’m excited about the future — I feel like we’re honing in on our collective creativity.”
Mann’s passionate observations result in some decidedly fresh and unexpected sounds. Self-discovery by way of exploration is a recurring theme as the pitfalls of love and summits of ecstasy are aptly represented in the alt-folk annals of Over Land and Sea.
“Travelling across Canada and volunteering at summer camps gave me a lot of ideas for the new album. It was really fun just having the option of doing anything we wanted. It opened my eyes to what can happen when you write, dream and imagine,” Mann says. “Finding yourself in a different place every night definitely helps you rediscover who you are and where your priorities lie. It’s cool to find your personal normal within crazy.”
CD release parties abound with the coming of spring and Lauren Mann and The Fairly Odd Folk are poised to bring their piano-based and glockenspiel-enhanced rural-rock mash-ups to patios across the nation. Embarking from their erstwhile headquarters in Brooks, Alberta, Mann and her P.T. Barnum-esque entourage look forward to plying their electro-acoustic craft at Regina’s JUNOFest. Next they’ll dip into the United States for what promises to be a rollicking North American tour.
“It’s kind of funny, but we think of ourselves as one big family on a trip. Musically we’re on the brink of folk, indie and pop. Now that we’re a full band, things are getting tighter and are leaning towards alt-pop with some folky elements. It’s hard to say what the next album will sound like…. I love rock and roll, but I fell into folk quite naturally, so it’ll likely be a hybrid of electric guitar and ukulele.”
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