10. Myriam GendronNot So Deep As A Well
It’s the setting of these Dorothy Parker poems, which is just such a great idea. Her voice and her delivery are so perfect for it. There’s something about it that’s joyous and gratifying for me. I could play it to the end of time and find new things, all these different subtleties and inflections in her voice. You could zoom all the way in with a microscope or all the way out, Hubble Telescope style. And on every level there’s some sort of psychedelic or brain altering thing to notice. You listen to Curtis Mayfield for a year straight, you start to hear more things as you change. The same with this record. It’s endless.
Myriam’s record is so beautifully played. The guitar playing on it is incredible, but it’s not at all in that kind of ‘dude needing to show off technical ability’ way. There’s a lesson in there for me. It’s not for me to say, but I don’t want to be guilty of technique for technique’s sake. With Myriam, the emotional resonance of her guitar playing was equally devastating as Hendrix to me, or Jack Rose. It’s all food for the brain.
I played with Myriam in Montreal, because I did a track with her on the record before this [Ma Délire]. Playing that was tough because I loved her records so much. [The track] was a mail collaboration, so it wasn’t in the room, which can be fun, but it’s also weird as an improvising person to be reacting to that recorded thing instead of a live thing. The records that have followed are also amazing, but Not So Deep As A Well just sticks out, because I was so unprepared for it. And the idea of doing the poems, she caught lightning in a bottle with that one.
