LUCIDMEDIA

Adaline: Famous For Fire And Great Songs

Written by Catherine Kustanczy Tuesday, 17 November 2009 17:55

Never mind the music; it’s all about the vampire.

West Coast singer/songwriter Adaline might have a beautiful voice, soulful music, and fierce musical chops, but it was a chance encounter with Twilight star Robert Pattinson a JunoFest party in late March that got her noticed.

The musician opened a Twitter account just days before accidentally running into the movie heartthrob, who was in town filming the Twilight sequel, New Moon. “Before I met him, I had five followers,” she laughs. She tweeted the spontaneous bumping-into at Vancouver’s Richard's On Richards, and saw her number of followers skyrocket. From there, she wrote a blog on the experience, which found its way to Pattinson fansites around the world. The plays on her MySpace page went through the ceiling too, with more than 23,000 listens over the next 40 hours.

“It was so random,” she notes. “Some people thought it was some marketing scheme, but there’s no way I have the resources or ability to pull that off!”

It’s fitting, however, that Adaline’s music found appeal among Pattinson’s hardcore Cullen-ites, because her work leans toward the grandly cinematic. “It’s emotive, it’s melodic,” she says of her work, “so it has a movie soundtrack-feel to it.”

Make that movie and television: Adaline’s work has been licensed to programs, including ABC’s “Defying Gravity”, USA’s “Royal Pains”, CTV’s “Degrassi”, Global TV’s “The Best Years” and CBC's “Heartland.” Her work has, perhaps unsurprisingly given Pattinson’s appeal, found a huge following among female listeners. “Ninety-nine-point-five per cent of people who’ve reached out are women, so it has been a bit of a crazy experience” –but she doesn’t mind, noting that the Pattinson encounter has assured her a solid fanbase of ardent supporters who might otherwise have not heard of her work. “They’re getting in touch and it’s been really amazing.”

Adaline –real name Shawna Beesley –began her career in suburban Toronto learning classical music and performing with her family in a gospel group called Beesley Family Singers. Her father was a minister as well as a trained pianist, and she grew up learning to play by ear. “He was the one who forced me to keep practising when I wanted to quit at twelve. Everyone reaches around twelve or thirteen, and goes, ‘I don’t want to do this,’ but he pushed me past it and said, ‘You gotta keep going, it’s for a greater good…’”

She decided on the name “Adaline” when she rang a phone carrier to dispute the amount of her cell phone bill. The operator offered her something called an “Add A Line” feature, and the musician decided to run with it. She thought the name sounded jut feminine enough, without being overly saccharine.

Adaline’s first album, Famous for Fire, was released in April. “For 99.9 per cent of the world, it’s new,” she says. “I’ve been having exposure with the album just right now, so like re-releasing it all over again. Different parts of the world are hearing it for the first time.”

Part of the exposure is owing to the slow-but-sure word of mouth about Adaline’s raw, exuberant live performances that are dazzling showcases of her musical abilities and meticulously constructed melodies. She has played Canadian Music Week, NXNE, The Western Canadian Music Awards, and of course, JunoFest, and was listed in the Top Echelon of Canada's Female Indie singer-Songwriters by some of Canada’s leading publications, including the Calgary Herald, the Montreal Gazette, The Ottawa Citizen, the Vancouver Sun, and the Edmonton Journal.

Busily touring Western Canada, where she was part of this past May’s New Music West festival, as well as doing “a little bit” of touring in Ontario earlier in the year. Despite the relentless grind of touring and promotion, she isn’t tiring of the material. “It’s weird I’m not,” she observes. “Some songs live more than others. I don’t really listen to it, which probably helps.”

The album took over a year to record at Vancouver’s Factory Studios and Demitone Productions. “Most friends are in and out within a month,” she muses, “but I was in for over a year!” The reason, she says, was the fierce desire she and producer Scott Sanft had to experiment with different styles and sounds. “We recorded a song, listened to it, and maybe we were happy with it, but if not, we’d scrap everything and start over.”

Described as “an electronic Edith Piaf” by British Columbia newspaper the Vernon Morning Star, Famous for Fire is filled with rich sonic soundscapes that incorporate a range of creative instrumentation. CBC Radio 3’s artist website for her describes it as “a stunning symphonic tapestry with electronic, folk, and rock persuasions” –which is perhaps one way of saying that Famous for Fire is less the sounds of a timid newcomer than the grand announcement of a dragoness fearlessly finding her way along new, sometime tenuous musical terrain.

Her guitar-playing brother Tyson Beesley, who co-produced the album with herself and Sanft, contributed to the tracks “Broken Glass,” “State of Mind” and “Poor You” lending the album an edgy, rock-oriented flavour. “I’ve always been the kind of person who wanted to do it right or not do it at all,” she says. “I spent a lot of time making sure the album was how I wanted it to be. I went crazy at one point…”

The perfectionist tendencies in Adaline might stem from her training as a classical musician. A background she share with many other Canadian singer/songwriters

“The thing that’s amazing about classical music that’s underestimated is that once you have a classical understanding, you can experiment in the craziest styles imaginable, all based on the same thing,” she observes. “For me, I love strings and sweeping arrangements, so when I write those things they come from a classical sensibility. Lately writing songs, I’m working with a DJ, which is the farthest thing from classical, but if you don’t have that base, it’s hard to arrange things. It’s all connected in the most amazing way.”

Many critics have compared her style to the work of another classically-trained minister’s daughter: Tori Amos. Adaline’s heard the comparison before, and laughs at it being brought up yet again. “I don’t even have a Tori Amos album!” she says, not so much protesting the comparison as offering a valid reason as to why there’s such a notable gap in her music collection: “I grew up in a sheltered music environment, so I was a bit of a music nerd.”

As befits a Christian family, Adaline grew up hearing only classical music and that deemed “safe” by relatives. Her introduction to rock and popular music came only around the age of twenty, so she had no way of familiarizing herself with any of Amos’ work prior to that. “I didn’t even know her when my album was released,” she continues. “When I wrote Chemical Spill, so many reviewers were saying, ‘This is early Tori Amos,’ and I had no idea what they were meaning… so the most organic comparison probably makes it more amazing. There’s no sense of imitation. Perhaps I was influenced classically, and that was the comparison that emerged.”

Amos wasn’t the only artist whose name got mentioned in reviews, either. Fiona Apple and Sarah Harmer were also brought up, which forced Adaline to do some sonic exploration. “I was being compared to people I had no idea of –so I had to go back.”

Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of Catherine’s interview with Adaline.