Lost and Found
Local Songstress to Release New Album
Erin Lang has a unique presence. She is unmistakably an artist. Her music is the aural epitome of softness. She sings in a hushed, girlish whisper, backed by well-paced melodies.
You wouldn’t know this is her first album. That may be because You Are Found was a long time coming—she has played music in different projects for quite some time now, first in Toronto, then during a 10-year stint in England.
“[The first album is] the easiest because you have everything to drop on it,” she said. “I was a bass player before I was a singer or a guitarist, and I only really started singing seven or eight years ago. At that time, I was playing with punk bands, which was a really different scene. I didn’t really connect to it that much.”
Her musical roots seem impossibly disconnected from her current sound, which came to be after exploration and self-discovery.
“There was this whole evolution of what I wanted things to sound like. Going to England really helped because I had cut myself off from the scene that I was in in Toronto,” Lang said.
“When I went to England, I discovered a completely different world with my partner at the time, Roger.” That’s Roger O’Donnell, former member of Brit band The Cure, who played on and was the musical director for the record.
When the time felt right, Lang went to producer Mario Thaler, who has worked with acts such as The Notwist. They recorded the album at Uphon Studios in Weilheim, Germany.
“[It] was a big, beautiful space,” she said. “[There were] a lot of smaller, independent studios [within the space].”
The sound of the record, as Lang explained, came together when she met Thaler.
“I write my own songs on the guitar, but I’m not a super strong guitarist, so I wanted to use a guitarist in the studio,” she said. “But [Thaler] was really against it—he was like, ‘No, I love the way you play the guitar. It’s you, it’s your voice!’”
Mario’s persuasion helped Lang see her guitar as a voice and not just a tool.
Playing the guitar on her record also encouraged Lang to take herself more seriously as a guitarist. Her minimalist style “became an [integral] part of the sound.”
Lang’s feelings on her album can be best summed up by a dream she had that became the inspiration for the album’s artwork.
“When we were seven songs into the record,” she explained, “I had a dream that I was in a hotel and there were seven white dogs—I guess they were the seven songs—running through [it].”
Erin Lang & The Foundlings will release You Are Found this Friday, Sept. 24 at L’inspecteur Epingle (4051 St. Hubert St.). The show will be at 9:00 p.m. and will feature other acts.
This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 06, published September 21, 2010.
