Laura Barrett’s untraditional love affair with the kalimba

The Canadian singer vows to stay true to her favorite instrument as she preps a new album

By Robyn Detterline
Published: March 27th, 2010 | 7:00pm

Many people are finding romance online these days, and Canadian songstress Laura Barrett is no different. What makes Barrett’s story interesting, however, is that Barrett wasn’t even looking for a relationship when she found it with a wooden box and metal tines known as the kalimba.

Barrett, a pianist, was searching online for an instrument that was a little handier than the ivories, “something portable, potentially a pocket synthesizer or a roll-up piano...something digital that allowed me to write music on the fly,” she says. But instead of a modern gadget she stumbled across the primitive kalimba, a thumb piano modeled after an African percussion instrument.

Barrett has also been a member of several groups, including the Hidden Cameras and Woodhands, but it is her solo work that makes her stand out. While Barrett’s instrument of choice is not terribly rare (the thumb piano has been somewhat of a novelty in the West since the 1960s), her ability to use it as a conveyor of pop melody is exceptionally rare. Most musicians have fun breaking out the kalimba once in awhile, but no one really seems to know how to sustain music-making with it. Barrett sees this problem as a matter of perception. “It’s not being treated as an instrument in its own right,” she notes. “And obviously if you don’t treat it like an instrument then you’re not going to develop melodies on it.”

Barrett overcame obstacles in her personal quest to master the kalimba, simply by sticking with it. “It teaches you how to play it,” she observes. “It opens your mind to its own specific structures.” Indeed, listening to Victory Garden, her latest album on Paper Bag Records, one hears just how much Barrett is privy to the inner workings of this tiny instrument. The pulsing kalimba is not clunky filler but a hypnotic roll through eccentric landscapes. Barrett worked with producer Paul Aucoin to interweave kalimba with strings, woodwinds, and pitched percussion. The result is an enigmatic tome that is somber and baroque but also blithe in its playful structure and arrangement.

There is much more to Victory Garden than kalimba. Some of the standout tracks on the album don’t even employ it, such as “The Sharper Side,” a romping piano, string, and brass suite that showcases Barrett’s versatile voice, as well as her lyrical wizardry. Words are important to Barrett, a student of literature and linguistics, and the album is inundated with startling images that sound as beautiful as the pictures they create. “I took the phrase ‘hippopotamus groves’ [in “The Sharper Side”] more for fun and the sound of the words than for the meaning,” she says. “But it is still supposed to mean something fantastical. So it carried weight in the song.”

In fact, there are many aspects of Barrett’s music that carry weight. Her melodic pop tunes are immediately accessible. The arrangements are expertly textured and dynamic. But beyond the describable musical prowess, most listeners are drawn to the inexpressible twinkle factor, the special sum of the parts that makes them feel as if they’re dancing around the edge of a black hole with cute star-creatures. Barrett herself describes her sound as “neurotic sci folk,” perhaps an accurate description for an album that contains songs like “Consumption,” “Escape to the Sun Dome,” and “Bluebird.”

Despite the unique things Barrett is doing holistically, some critics focus on her kalimba and immediately label her music “gimmicky.” She’s been accused of aping both Konono No.1 and Joanna Newsom because of her use of kalimba and classical instrumentation. But Barrett has learned not to worry about these accusations. “It’s too easy to look at the one unique or novel feature and say, well, this is gimmicky. It’s not gimmicky, it’s just the way I’m working right now.”

She expresses some regret that listeners might not experience the depth of her music because they’re turned off by kalimba. All the same, she doesn’t intend on switching gears any time soon. “I’m still learning it,” says Barrett. She’s continuing her exploration with a cover album slated for later this spring, and also another full-length album of original material that she says is still “a mystery.” The only given is that it will feature well-crafted arrangements, sweetly-powerful melodies, and enchanting kalimba. “There’s no end point,” she says of her relationship with the instrument. Sounds like a true love story after all.

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Laura Barrett MySpace page

Paper Bag Records