I promise that I'll not be one of those who only thinks female musicians are only good for their voices, but I've been overwhelmed by the voice since I first heard Berio's "Sequenza III" my first year of college. You'll read a great deal about singers and singing and the sound of words and sound of voice and other sounds that come out of or near a human's mouth. And so my first post about a female musician is about a singer-songwriter from Canada named Basia Bulat.

I walked in on Bulat when she was opening for Devotchka last month. I missed her first tune but got to my spot on the floor just as she and her band started the ukulele/hand clap backed "Before I Knew." It's a short little song about the moment that an artist creates for the first time. The harmonies hit me hard. Bulat is a great singer (more on this later) and while no one else in her band is going to blow your mind, the two women (ukulele and viola) and the guy (cellist) work hard on that song and its about as perfect as it can be for a song about someone who didn't know they were incomplete until they sang for the first time. It's about transcendence but it's also about the brevity of transcendence and the inevitable return to the blind. That's what the song sounds like.

The set then followed the album pretty closely. Bulat plays a country-influenced kind of contemporary acoustic music. Her writing is quite nice and she has a great ear. The second song on the album Oh, My Darling, "I Was a Daughter" has been on a loop on my computer for weeks now. I'm a sucker for how certain words and phrases sound (I'll put that in my pocket as a post) and I have a new favorite from that song. "Turned into dusty roads/that we both wandered on;/We prayed for perfect Avalon;" I could (and do) listen to those five seconds over and over.

Bulat's voice on the record isn't as powerful as it is in person. Apparently they recorded everything in a couple days as demos and she lost her voice part way through. But someone thought they were perfect they were so they never re-did any of it. I don't know if I agree, but the performances from those sessions are sometimes fantastic. In person Bulat is a joy to watch it. She can't be more than 5'2'' with blond hair and (when I saw her) a sun dress and no shoes. I can't recall a more jubilant performer. She played damn near every instrument on the stage and did some impressive singing all while leading a five piece band, but not once did she look anything less than ecstatic to be singing. You might think the grin on her face in the video for her first single "In the Night" is contrived, but that's what she looks like the entire time she is singing.



And that's what impresses me most about Bulat. The record is better than most, but you have to see her in person to get the full effect. I see some good live music. That night I saw an excellent show by Devotchka. But while they were perhaps more polished than Bulat and her crew and Nick Nurata has one of the most underrated voices in music these days, there wasn't the same kind of joy in the act of creation. Bulat's performance left me not only wanting more of her energy but left me wanting to create. Somewhere along the line in Western culture we decided that making art is for the artists and our role is to experience their genius. Suddenly crafts were just ugly things for lame people to peruse in the heat. But art need not be good to be important. It's the act of doing that might be just as if not more important. If art is experience, then let's not settle for the experience of others' art, but let's experience our own.