Heartrending Confessions: Julie Doiron in Beijing

Not to get Nietzschean on everyone, but life is a series of senseless motions, random happenstances and chance encounters, requiring someone special to parse into moments that matter and those that don’t. That’s the artist’s gift to us. Attending Julie Doiron’s songwriting workshop this Friday (March 19) won’t necessarily give you this power overnight, but it certainly won’t hurt.

Doiron, a New Brunswick native who’s apparently very popular in Bruno, Saskatchewan, started her musical career in 1990 with the band Eric’s Trip before embarking on a successful solo career with the album Broken Girl in 1996. She has won fans and critical acclaim by following a simple maxim: write what you know. She claims to write first for herself, using songwriting as a “form of therapy,” but her songs happen to resonate with listeners who identify with her perilous odysseys of love and toils of child-rearing, who have experienced heart-shattering grief and unabashed happiness, who accept the poignant losses and small revelations of daily life in order to obtain, as Tolstoy put it in Anna Karenina, the joys “so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand.”

Doiron’s introspective lyrics oscillate between approachably abstract and unflinchingly straightforward. And though she professes to rely more on agile melodies than verbal brawn, some of her lines thrum just the right heartstrings, as in “You Look So Alive”: “But I can’t get over how the sun looks on your face, / it makes you look so alive. / And your eyes tell me we’ve made a mistake / and we’ll pass on the streets. / I won’t look away if you don’t look away.”

Anthony Tao caught up with the 37-year-old singer-songwriter on the eve of her appearance in Beijing as part of the JUE Festival to talk about the songwriting process.

How do you get over the potential embarrassment of revealing parts of your private self to complete strangers? I imagine that has to be a pretty harrowing process sometimes.
If I start thinking about it, I’ll just run in the opposite direction and probably never make another record, so I kind of have to just put them out there. There’ve been a few songs that I felt like were really way too personal and I wish I hadn’t released them, but for the most part I kind of just let them go and not think about it.

Can you give me an example of one of your more personal songs?
I think one of my most personal songs has been “Untitled,” the hidden track on Woke Myself Up. And that was the only song I wrote post-breakup with my husband, and it was directly about… basically, it was the most confessional song I’ve ever written, and because it was so confessional it took me basically four to six months. I sort of had to decide to say those things, and then to actually say them, and then actually to record it and put it on the record…

How do you “write what you know” without sounding narcissistic? Are you constantly toeing that line, or fighting against it, or pushing it?
I don’t know. Like, maybe I do sound narcissistic. I try not to think about that.

There’s times where I think, Why am I doing music at all? I have those thoughts more often than [thoughts about] trying not to come off as narcissistic. But at the same time, I also think I need to be a songwriter. I’ve tried to quit writing music, I’ve tried to quit playing, I’ve tried to do those things, and I keep coming back to it in spite of myself.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give aspiring musicians or songwriters?
Do what feels right and be true to yourself. You can push yourself to try new things, but you should do what feels right. I would never want to do just what is popular at the time.

That said, I’ve been touring for 17 years and I can finally pay my bills, so maybe my advice is wrong. Maybe do what’s popular. [Laughs.]

Julie Doiron’s songwriting workshop is presented in conjunction with the Bookworm International Literary Festival 2010, and takes place at 3pm this Friday, March 19 at Yishu 8. RMB 200. Tickets available from the Bookworm.
On the same night, Doiron plays 2 Kolegas, from 8:30pm. RMB 60.