Guy Maddin and Whistler Film Festival

Part 1 of my Q&A with Guy Maddin is in this week's WE, just in time for the Whistler Film Fest. Part 2 will be out when his new film Keyhole gets released.

COVER STORY: Guy Maddin invites us to peer through the ‘Keyhole’

Posted By: Andrea Warner

The USA has David Lynch, Spain has Pedro Almodovar and Canada has Guy Maddin. Arguably they are the modern makers of weird, disquieting beauty that’s rooted in a genuine desire to explore the bottomless depths and shallow pools of human experience. They make movies that mess with our sense of self. Maddin, particularly, is a master of this as reflected by his unsettling new film, Keyhole. It’s a tense, disturbing genre mashup of 1930s gangster and haunted house flicks, gorgeously shot in black and white. It’s also a contender in the prestigious Borsos Competition at the 11th annual Whistler Film Festival. (For more on the Borsos award, see next page.)

The words “perverse” and “strange” get thrown around a lot by writers when talking about your films. Do you take pleasure in having a certain shock value?
Nothing is shocking. And real life can be perverse and strange. I just don’t have it in me to produce naturalistically performed movies set in workaday worlds. I’m not Chekovian enough. And besides, my tastes run to folk tales – savage narratives that tell us in no uncertain terms fearsome things about ourselves, no matter how strange or perverse they might seem. Please regard the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. Perverse and strange geniuses and superb role models.

It seems like Canadian cinema has never been stronger, and yet it still suffers from a serious inferiority complex. What’s your take on its evolution?
Canadian cinema just needs a big breakout, a phenomenal film that blows away all our fears, and the world’s preconceptions of our timid ways all at once. It’ll come. You can’t make it happen, it’ll just happen if we keep trying.

What made you decide to ground Keyhole so specifically in a house?
I used to dream of lost loved ones, in delirious nightly dramas during which I worked through, or expressed, feelings that never quite untangled themselves while everyone was alive. Now I dream only of empty architecture. These dreams are more haunting to me than the old unfinished-business dreams involving the family ghosts. I decided I wanted to make a movie that was about a house, about the places in which we live and they feelings they can produce in us. It’s too glib to say I wanted to make a film starring a house, because more often than not I like to watch films with people in them – not always, but mostly. So I knew I wanted to stray from my recurrent dreams and actually populate the corridors of my night-architecture with characters. But I also knew I wanted to stay inside that house the whole film. It’s a good-looking home with lots of detail, lots of surprises, surely more than enough visual richness to support 90 minutes screen time without it wearying anyone’s eyes. After all, we spend infinite hours in our own homes, often loving the environs more and more with each passing day. I wanted viewers to feel comfy, at home, in that house by movie’s end. Who knows if I got it right.

What does it mean to you to have Keyhole be part of the Borsos competition?
I am honoured. Borsos was a great filmmaker. I met him a couple of times and was deeply impressed.

Why is it important to have competitions like this one that honour Canadian films?
The winning of prizes means little, or should mean little, to the filmmakers themselves, but prizes help mythologize and glamorize the craft, help elevate Canadian filmmaking into the competitive and glitzy delirium of showbiz and all its artificial glamour. The prizes help remind us to embrace the artificiality of filmmaking, make us complicit in its fakeness, make us want to participate in the dream on the screen more. Without such prizes we Canadians will watch our films with a grim literal-mindedness we’ve always deployed in shooting down our own work the instant it gets airborne.

What is Canada’s film reputation internationally? Are we held in high esteem?
I can’t tell. I think everyone just feels sorry for me when they say nice things to me, and way more often they say terrible things to me. And I’m too busy bad-mouthing my Canadian colleagues to judge fairly how they’re perceived internationally.

Twenty or 30 years ago, the idea seemed to be that if you wanted to make it as a filmmaker, you had to leave Canada. How much of that perception remains today?
I’ve never even left Winnipeg to make a movie, so you’re asking the wrong person. I even suspect you asked this just to rub that fact in. But I do know that a hometown person is never deemed a complete success until he or she leaves and achieves something significant away from home. That applies to every country, not just Canada. Probably the worst place to be born in is Hollywood itself. These are the kids that have the biggest discriminations to deal with.

Daydream Nation

My review of Daydream Nation is in this week's WE.

Kat Dennings bewitches boys and men in Daydream Nation.

Credit: Supplied

DAYDREAM NATION
Starring Kat Dennings, Josh Lucas
Directed by Michael Goldbach

A serial killer is on the loose as an industrial fire burns perpetually in the background. Daydream Nation might not be your typical romantic teen comedy, but it is a quintessentially Canadian one: quirky, funny, strange, and bittersweet.

Seventeen-year-old Caroline (Kat Dennings) is the new girl in a small B.C. town, but she has little in common with her peers. She seeks solace in the only other sophisticate she can find — her teacher, Mr. Anderson (Josh Lucas). To deflect suspicion about their affair, Caroline agrees to date classmate Thurston (Reece Thompson), a sweet stoner who falls hard and enlists his mother, Enid (Andie McDowell) to cozy up to Caroline’s disapproving father, Mr. Wexler (Ted Whittall).

The cast executes their roles perfectly. Thompson, a native Vancouverite, is believably awkward and awed by Dennings’ Caroline, and does a wonderful job exhibiting Thurston’s anger and confusion when he finds out about her betrayal. Lucas, so often cast in good guy roles, tempers his typically sexy charm with a crazy-eyed edge. The unorthodox love triangle nicely mirrors Caroline’s own competing personae of savvy seductress and smart, sad adolescent, and Dennings skillfully moves between the two, conveying Caroline’s sardonic angst with aplomb.

Working from writer-director Michael Goldbach’s confident script, Nation plays up the absurdity of suburbia, artfully blending the line between wickedly funny and tragic. The stories, including that serial killer subplot which haunts the film like a dark shadow, culminate in a twisty, startling conclusion that’s satisfyingly, and fittingly, David Lynch-lite. —Andrea Warner

Bruce McDonald interview

My interview with Bruce McDonald appeared in WE this week. It was such a great time! Hope everyone enjoys it.

Pontypool director Bruce McDonald.

Bruce McDonald dives into Pontypool

It's 9:15 a.m. when Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo, The Tracey Fragments) ambles in to a downtown café. He has a friendly smile underneath his sandy-grey beard, and his trademark Stetson-style hat (this time in black) and jeans make him look like a cross between a cowboy and a biker. He exudes a certain tough-guy cool — something one would expect from a man who has a reputation for making movies that typically feature sex, drugs, and/or rock ’n’ roll in varying combinations.

It’s the 49-year-old director’s second interview of the morning promoting the fantastic new thriller, Pontypool, his first foray into the blood-and-guts horror genre. Based on Tony Burgess’s 1998 novel Pontypool Changes Everything, it centres on a crusty, opinionated morning-show radio host, Grant Mazzy (played by the delightfully grizzled Stephen McHattie), who’s been exiled to the titular small town, broadcasting with his producer and assistant from a church basement. Suddenly, reports start pouring in that some kind of plague is taking over the town, turning people into zombies, and being spread through the English language.

Hard Core Logo, The Tracey Fragments, and now Pontypool — they’re all adaptations from books. Do you have an inclination toward reading something and then wanting to translate those images in your head?

McDonald: Maybe I read a little more than the normal guy. It’s a kick, you know — the heavy lifting is done, in a way. With a book, you don’t just crack it off in a couple months; it’s often years of work and thought... Not all books make great movies, but I do get a satisfaction in passing the torch. I have a great respect for writers — maybe because I wanted to be a writer myself. It also puts you in the unique position of being a one-man “Yay, CanCon!” advocate. And it’s a fairly exuberant “Yay!” because we have some fairly world-class writers. There’s something nice about when you discover there are these gods standing in your backyard.

What was your first reaction to reading Pontypool Changes Everything? Did you immediately want to turn it into something you could texturize?

Well, the book is a strange and mysterious beast; it’s a collage of a lot of different moments organized around the idea of a language virus. That was the thing that really grabbed me. I loved the playfulness of it, and I could see the real terror. Imagine something as familiar as your language turning against you. It reminded me of Hitchcock’s The Birds — something so ordinary, as opposed to the high concept of something from outer space.

There’s a lot to analyze in this film.

That’s why it’s such a good movie to see when you’re high. (laughs)

Almost the entire movie takes place in this underground radio station, in a church basement, and the characters have no visual proof of what’s transpiring outside at first.

Almost like Dr. Strangelove. That’s the whole thing: It was a bit of experiment, in that we thought we could maybe raise the stakes by making our audience cling to our characters. They don’t have the privilege of seeing the director’s cut outside. Just the fact that we stay there with the characters hopefully creates that same sense of unease and, like, What-the-fuck’s-going-on-out-there? feeling.

When you screened it for everyone, did it achieve what you wanted it to?

Making a movie’s kind of an act of will or an act of mass hypnosis, and you’re totally prepared to do it... and you’re like, “Okay, I know I can do this with four actors in a room with my sister’s camera.” So, that was my first imagining of the movie. All the other stuff that happened — the fact that we got Steve McHattie, this great location to shoot it in, that it was photographed so handsomely, that we could afford projectile vomit — we were like, “Holy shit, this is kind of a dream come true.” My original vision was so lame compared to what was actually done by the gang who arrived to do it.

The Drowsy Chaperone

My review of The Drowsy Chaperone appears in this week's WE.

A “perfect” cast lampoons the innocent entertainments of a simpler time in the Vancouver premiere of the Tony Award-winning musical, The Drowsy Chaperone.

Raucous, high-energy ‘Chaperone’ anything but drowsy

Posted By: Andrea Warner

The Drowsy Chaperone, the happiest accidental success in Canadian theatre history, tore a whirlwind path from stag-party goof to Tony Award-winning Broadway smash. Now, seven dizzying years after making its debut at the Toronto Fringe Festival, Chaperone finally tap-dances its way onto a Vancouver stage in the show’s first-ever independent production.

Easily one of the highlights of the city’s theatre year, Chaperone is a loving send-up and celebration of musicals from days gone by. Fashioned as a play-within-a-play, it’s narrated by Man in Chair (a show-stealing Jay Brazeau, equally hilarious and touching), a Broadway aficionado suffering from unspecified sadness. Putting on a cast recording, he’s transported from his drab New York apartment into the world of his all-time favourite trifle, The Drowsy Chaperone, a typical 1920s -style romantic comedy chock full of mistaken identities and silly twists. The plot, such as it is, revolves around getting a glamourous stage star (Debbie Timuss) to the altar, all under the neglectful, gin-soaked eye of her chaperone (Gabrielle Jones).

Cast perfectly, there are a few performers — and numbers — worth highlighting. Timuss is charmingly funny as the woman caught between her addiction to fame and her desire to be with the man of her dreams (particularly during the sidesplitting “The Bride’s Lament”). Jones is great as the boozy chaperone who lives entirely in her own world, as demonstrated in her passionate number “As We Stumble Along.” In fact, almost every song offers a pleasant surprise, from the tap-dance between the groom-to-be and the best man during “Cold Feet,” to the irreverent “Message from a Nightingale,” a mocking admission of Broadway’s racist past.

Chaperone’s only notable fault is that, occasionally, words sung in the lower registers get lost, whether overpowered by the onstage band or through strange blocking, where an actor is momentarily singing with his/her back to the audience. This snag only stands out because the rest of the production, from choreography to costuming, is so damn good.

It may have taken seven years, but The Drowsy Chaperone was well worth the wait.

Scott Pilgrim article

My new piece on Scott Pilgrim is in the autumn issue of Naked Eye. It looks amazing in person-and it's two full double page spreads! Make sure to pick up a copy if you can.

Why Scott Pilgrim is Awesome
By Andrea Warner

It might just be that this first decade of the 21st century will go down as the Dawn of the Geeks. Iron Man, Batman, and X-Men have all achieved massive box-office success and spawned (or re-started) successful franchises.

And now, an entirely new brand of comic book hero will ascend the throne, rising up from the pages of his six-book series and brought to life by Canada’s own favourite man-child, Michael Cera, in the upcoming film adaptation, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

Suck on that, Spidey.

Bryan Lee O'Malley, a 29 year-old Toronto writer and illustrator, published his first Scott Pilgrim book in 2004. The manga-influenced art and wickedly funny story quickly acquired legions of rabid fans. And who wouldn't want to be Scott Pilgrim?

At the start of the series (we’re now four volumes in, two to go) Scott Pilgrim is 23, dating a high-school girl named Knives Chau, and kicking ass in a rock band. Then he meets Ramona Flowers, the dangerously intriguing, inter-dimensional roller-blading delivery-girl—but before they can be together, he must fight her seven evil ex-boyfriends.

Here are the top five reasons why Scott Pilgrim is awesome, and what this means for you, Canada, and the world.

1. Scott Pilgrim, Every Man

That roommate you have? That guy you used to date? That face you see when you look in the mirror? Chances are, if you’re between the ages of 20 and 40, you are Scott Pilgrim and he is you.

Part of Pilgrim’s appeal as a protagonist is that he feels real, minus the super fighting skills. Sometimes he hurts girls’ feelings, he’s often lazy, and he frequently says the wrong thing. His best friends freely warn the women in his life that he’s not good enough for them. He’s flawed and he feels human, and this is partly because he’s loosely based on O’Malley’s 23-year-old self.

“I was living in Toronto, and I just had come out of a breakup and I started writing down ideas for a story that was like exactly what I was doing and then it kind of just grew out of that,” he says, over the phone. “Then I started dating a girl from the US (graphic novelist Hope Larson, now his wife) and I had a gay roommate and I joined a band and so it kind of developed over a couple years.”

Talking to O’Malley is a bit like reading a SP book. The cadences, rhythm, and word choices are eerily familiar—Pilgrim and O’Malley both sound like any average person raised on a steady diet of pop culture.

And this isn’t surprising.

In creating Scott Pilgrim, O’Malley has captured the defining interests of a lot of 25 to 40-year olds, a cross-generational group whose desire to find love while playing video games and getting their geek on has given rise to this new brand of hero.

James Lucas Jones, the Editor-in-Chief of Oni Press in Portland, Oregon, publishers of Scott Pilgrim, remembers being impressed by O’Malley’s ability to make Pilgrim so relatable.

“I think it's fun without being dumb or empty,” Jones says. “Almost everyone knows somebody that's like Scott or had a similar approach to life as he does.”

Christopher Butcher, manager of The Beguiling in Toronto, is also a big fan of the series, and attributes its universal resonance to O’Malley’s ability to infuse the story with grander themes.

“I think the unexpected dark bits in the books really work,” Butcher says. “There’s a depth to the characters and story that you wouldn’t expect if someone just described the premise to you.”

SP has also proved that independent publishers can become major players in the comic book industry, and has helped solidify Portland’s reputation as a haven of originality and creativity.

Brett Warnock co-owns Top Shelf, a fellow comics publishing house in Portland, Oregon, and he remembers reading SP for the first time.

“It blew my mind. In fact, I wrote at the time that it was my favorite graphic novel of the year,” Warnock says. In addition to loving Scott’s constant girl drama, Warnock appreciates O’Malley’s ability to mix genres and influences into witty and realistic teen drama, and is excited about what SP’s success means to his business.

“It shows that smaller publishers are just as, if not more capable than the big New York publishers, in finding talent and crafting little gems like this,” Warnock says. “It’s a new style for an evolving audience.”

2. Scott Pilgrim, a Lover and a Fighter

All’s fair in love and war in the SP universe. Pilgrim, as it turns out, is one of the best fighters, like, ever. And, almost every major character has been involved in some kind of battle by the end of the fourth book. The fights are equal opportunity (boy vs. girl, girl vs. girl, etc), and typically involve some element of the inventive or surreal. One of the evil ex-boyfriends uses a signature cheesy move whereby he woos girls by punching a hole in the moon.

And no landscape is off limits: Knives Chau and Ramona end up in an epic brawl at the Toronto Reference Library when Knives goes a little crazy after finding out Scott cheated on her.

Part of the appeal of Pilgrim as a fighter, is that the sequences often mimic that of the videogames Pilgrim and O’Malley love so much, incorporating the fantastical and the surreal with equal aplomb. When Pilgrim wins a fight against a bad guy, he might randomly collect coins ($2 for one, $14 for another), or earn an extra life, or pick up a sword or a mushroom. It’s part fun throwback, part witty commentary on becoming the hero of your own fantasy, which leads to...

His constant parade of hot ex-girlfriends almost rivals that of Ramona’s evil ex-boyfriends. His callous break-up with Knives Chau breaks our hearts, but his utterly sweet devotion to winning Ramona means all is forgiven. And O’Malley gets the details just right: Scott and Ramona’s courtship may be fraught with supernatural predicaments, but it’s juxtaposed with earthly delights, such as their first sleepover, or holding hands under the moon.

The real reason for Scott’s vast assortment of beautiful women is rooted in the same influences that O’Malley used to create the series’ distinctive look.

“It comes out of Japanese comics, which I was really into in high school and stuff,” O’Malley says. ”There's just a whole genre of stories about one guy who's pursued by all the girls who are all way hotter than him and that's kind of ridiculous and unrealistic so I wanted to take the germ of that but make something a little more emotionally true out of it.”

O’Malley also attributes Scott’s attractiveness to the opposite sex as “selective world-view. I think he's mostly awesome in his own mind.”

3. Scott Pilgrim, Rock star

Who doesn’t have dreams of playing in a band with their best friends, rocking out in a battle of the bands, and having adoring fans?

Sex Bob-omb, Pilgrim’s band with Stephen Sills and Kim Pine, borrows its name from a character in Super Mario Bros. Every other band mentioned in the book also borrows its name from a video game. Among them, Scott’s high school band with Kim Pine recalls the Sega Genesis game Sonic & Knuckles, and Scott’s ex, Envy, plays in The Clash At Demonhead, which references both an NES game and the punk band, The Clash.

O’Malley’s own one-man band Kupek is actually pretty good. The sound is slightly countrified with great beats, think Wilco with a smattering of older Counting Crows (that’s a good thing!), and boasts song titles that could be lines from any of the SP books, such as “You Practically Rock” and “Poster Child for Happiness.”

4. Scott Pilgrim, Canadian

O’Malley was raised in London, Timmins, and North Bay, Ontario, and then lived in Toronto for just three years in his early 20s, but it was long enough to make an impression. Serving as the backdrop for the SP universe, quirky reference points from the cityscape punctuate the art, bringing a coolness to TO O’Malley never intended.

“I've kind of unintentionally become this Toronto ambassador,” O’Malley says. “I don't really have that much great love for the city, it just happens to be my setting. Like, Sneaky Dee’s. I always kind of hated Sneaky Dee’s, but everyone would go there, and they still do, so I just wanted to keep that in. One of the ideas was to have a record of what we did in Toronto in 2003-04.”

Butcher, for one, jokes that the books border on being too Canadian.

“He might even confuse our American neighbours, with his Toronto landmarks and his superfluous U’s,” Butcher says. “All we need in the fifth volume is for him to be crying while watching one of those Canadian Heritage Moments on TV.”

O’Malley also writes a blog where he posts an annotated Scott Pilgrim with photos and landmarks that inspired scenes in the book, including the Wychwood Library, Casa Loma, the Dufferin Mall, and the CN Tower, all of which could serve as potential locations when the Scott Pilgrim movie finally commences shooting in the fall…

5. Scott Pilgrim, Movie star

Edgar Wright, the director of the SP movie, had just come off of filming Shaun of the Dead when Universal sent him a random assortment of stuff to consider making his next film. He clicked with SP, and sparked a long-distance friendship with O’Malley that’s spanned the last several years.

The majority of information about the movie is pretty speculative, but a few concrete details as of this writing:

• The film, tentatively scheduled for 2009, will span the entirety of the series, even those books that haven’t come out yet.

• Michael Bacall, who has acted in Free Willy and Grindhouse, is set to write the screenplay. He’s also adapting a film based on the documentary King of Kong.

• Michael Cera (Arrested Development, Juno, Superbad) will play Scott Pilgrim and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Live Free or Die Hard, Grindhouse’s Deathproof) is attached to play Ramona Flowers.

O’Malley’s involvement in the film’s slow evolution is music to SP fans’ ears, and heralds a promise that the film won’t stray too far from the books’ trademark wit and heart.

“It’s been three and a half years-ish we’ve been talking about it,” O’Malley says. “So, they (the movie) definitely had an influence on the books as well. But, I’ve gone over the books with them and what the references are and what I made up and kind of stole or whatever. I’ve read the screenplay drafts and stuff like that. I’m like a sounding board for them, I guess.”

His official role is consultant, which suits him just fine.

“I didn’t really want to write it,” O’Malley admits. “I’ve never written a screenplay. And when they started writing it, I was still finding my feet in this world and I didn’t have any interest in trying to take a stab at it. I think what the’ve done is pretty cool.”

He’ll also likely play a big part in co-creating the soundtrack, if he and Wright have any say in it. For the last few years, the pair has been trading music they feel fits with the SP universe. And, it promises lots of Canadian content on O’Malley’s side.

“Sloan and Plumtree,” he says, naming a few of his favourite bands that inspired some of his SP work. “And then we (Wright and I) just kind amalgamated the best of our tracks into a couple discs of music and sent that to Universal, so I think it will be a pretty interesting and eclectic mix.”

Ultimately, if the movie does well, it could potentially spawn into an SP franchise, taking on the big guys like Batman or the Hulk. Marvel Comics is unleashing a torrent of Avengers-based hero movies over the next several years, and with comic-book sales reaching record numbers in print and on film, the genre shows no signs of slowing down.

But, as much as the world loves the quirky Canadian comic book hero who has helped change the face of independent publishing, O’Malley is ready to look beyond Scott Pilgrim.

When asked if he’s thought about crafting any spin-offs or plans to carry on the series, he laughs and quickly says, “I hope not! I'm really ready to move on to something else once it's done.”

Good luck, O’Malley. We think the Scott Pilgrim craze is just getting started.

Karen X. Tulchinsky interview

My new interview with Karen X. Tulchinsky appears in this week's WE.

By Andrea Warner

She’s got a reputation for playing fast and loose with the conventional rules of what a writer’s career should look like, with origins in short queer fiction, and editing a series of racy lesbian erotica, Hot & Bothered. Despite stints in screenwriting for television and film, as well as three full-length novels, Karen X. Tulchinsky is only now fully reaping the rewards of mainstream success with The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, recently named the recipient of the One Book, One Vancouver award. Tulchinsky, who will be reading at The Word on the Street National Book and Magazine Festival this Saturday, Sept. 28, spoke with WE about her latest novel, the trials of being a Canadian author and her next creative venture.

The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky is a big departure from your previous books, which have largely had a more queer focus. How did Five Books come about?
The seeds were stories from my grandfather, who was a Russian Jewish Immigrant. I have great memories of sitting on the crinkly plastic of my grandparent’s living room sofa, while my grandfather would tell me stories of his heroic escape across the Dneister River, from Russia to Romania, at a time when the Soviet authorities did not want Jews to leave the country, and the Romanians did not want Jews to enter.

What are some of the challenges you have faced and overcome in becoming a successful author?
The hardest challenge in becoming a successful Canadian writer is balancing time and money. It’s difficult to have the focused creative time necessary to write a novel if you are working a full time job. It’s a Catch-22 situation, because generally speaking, an author does not get paid until they sell their novel to a publisher, which is usually after writing many drafts, which takes time. So as an author, you are always juggling — taking on paid work to pay the bills, then trying to squeeze in writing time. Things are only going to get harder if Canadians vote in a majority government with Stephen Harper as Prime Minister. He recently cut 45 million dollars in arts funding, and there is every indication that he intends to cut more. Frankly, it’s hard enough for writers to create books in this country, which worries me, not so much as a writer, but as a Canadian—without our own stories being told, how will we know our own culture?

You’re a novelist and you work in television as well. Is the transition seamless? How did you cross over originally?
The transition from publishing to working in television was a five year process. After Love Ruins Everything, my first novel, was published, I adapted it into a screenplay. I wrote a couple more screenplays, then applied to and was accepted into the Professional Screenwriting Program at the Canadian Film centre in Toronto. When I returned, I began to work as a writer and story editor on locally produced television shows. It’s a very different world. Fortunately for me, I adapt well to new environments.

What are you working on now? Do you have big plans for your next book or TV project?
Yes. I have more ideas than I know what to do with. I’m working on a new historical novel, called The Shoemaker’s Daughter, set between 1941 and 1977 in Russia, Vancouver, and Jerusalem. I have a screenplay adaptation of The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky in development. I’m creating several new original TV series with a writing partner, while also working as a creative consultant for a documentary television series.

Karen X. Tulchinsky will read at The Word on the Street from The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, backed by a Klezmer Band, on Sunday September 28, at 3 p.m. in the Author’s Tent.

Anne Murray interview

My Anne Murray profile appears in the Charleston City Paper today!

Cool Is Her Middle Name: Anne Murray rides the 'chick bus' into Charleston

By Andrea Warner

Anne Murray is as Canadian as hockey, maple syrup, and beaver tails. She's rocked the same hairstyle since 1986. Her name may not be synonymous with cool, but evidence keeps mounting to the contrary: she was best friends with the late Dusty Springfield, she hung out with the Beatles, and her latest album, Anne Murray Duets: Friends and Legends, took Billboard's country and internet sales charts by storm.

Murray's voice, a powerful contralto, is as rich as her career is long. Her current cross-country tour boasts stops in over 50 cities, where she proudly rides on a "chick bus" with her daughter and the three other women in the band. (The guys get their own buses.) Though the pace can be exhausting, she's feeling well rested when we connect over the phone.

Speaking from her hotel in Florida, where the weather has turned unseasonably cold, Murray is ill equipped for the dip in temperature, but her laugh is like her reputation: warm and generous. The fans that crowd her shows know what to expect, but the uninitiated audience will likely be humbled by the family-like camaraderie. That, and the 40-plus years of performing experience she brings to the stage.

"A lot of people are surprised by the sense of humor and the fun that we have," she says. "This group has been together a long time. We're like a family, and we have fun on stage. And, I have nothing left to prove anymore. I go out and sing and have a good time, and I think people enjoy that."

Murray grew up inspired by musicians who also enjoyed having a good time with their craft. Her musical tastes are all over the map — a fact she attributes to her parents and the eras in which she grew up.

"I listened to every kind of music, Murray says. "My parents listened to Bing Crosby, Perry Como, the Mills Brothers. I loved Doris Day, Patty Page, and Rosemary Clooney. I went through the rock 'n' roll era, then the folk era. All of those things had an influence on me. And then The Beatles came. The Beatles were like the second coming to me. Then Dusty Springfield was in there. She was my favorite. She's always been one of my favorite female vocalists."

Duets is entirely devoted to women vocalists, and the contributors couldn't be more diverse: Shania Twain, Olivia Newton John, Carole King, and Celine Dion, to name a few. Murray's own sound has influenced artists like Nelly Furtado, Jann Arden, and Sarah MacLachlan, and she readily admits that some of the contributors to Duets were more than a little apprehensive to meet her.

"Some of these girls, like k.d. lang, Shania, Nelly Furtado, were weaned on my music," Murray says. "They were a little intimidated and nervous, but not for long."

Some might imagine that an album boasting hugely successful singers would mean massaging a lot of egos, but Murray speaks of the process with nothing but fondness.

"There wasn't a diva in the lot. Everyone came really well prepared. Everyone had a lot of fun doing it. It was just a great experience," Murray says. And there were some pleasant revelations along the way.

Murray initially had zero interest in making the album. Her record company spent a lot of time convincing her to give it a try. Lured by the idea of creating a collaborative album, she finally agreed.

"I wasn't interested at all," she remembers. "But, they kept pushing and they had a big meeting with my management people and their people and they twisted my arm. And, here we are: two Juno nominations [the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys] and double platinum. It's been a shocker. Goes to show you I don't always know what's best for me."