Carolyn Mark
w/ Rodney DeCroo and His Convictions and Ayla Brook. Oct. 10 (8pm). The Pawn Shop (10551-82 Ave). Tickets: $10 at the door.
I think I woke Carolyn Mark up. Or at least the fact that I was calling got her up earlier than she might have liked. When I phone on the dot of 12 noon — 11 a.m. at her home in Victoria — she is still grinding coffee beans and asks me to hold on a second. I do.
While we wait, I can tell you that Mark’s fifth and most recent solo album, the easy-swinging country offering of Nothing Is Free, was released back in 2007. Before, during, and after Nothing Is Free, she sang, toured, and recorded with plenty of friends and colleagues, including Neko Case, Corb Lund, and Luke Doucet.
When the whirling of the grinder stops, Mark tells me that she’s working on a new record with another Canadian act, the Toronto-based folk-rockers NQ Arbuckle. “It’s sort of the opposite of the last record,” Mark says. “It’s all rock ’n’ roll and meticulous. Not breezy, rent-a-hall with your buddies.” She chooses the word “meticulous” carefully — using it the way one might use the word “interesting” after seeing a friend mount a one-man play exploring what it would be like to be a block of cheese.
But Mark does sound genuinely excited about the results of all that “meticulous” work. “I think it’s going to sound really good. They’re smarting me up, those Toronto boys,” she says with a chuckle.
Throughout our conversation, Mark is quick to laugh and, to be honest, I get more laughter out of her than answers. When I ask her if she’s still partying just as hard as reported in the past, she replies with a second of hesitation, then a slightly embarrassed “yeah” and more giggling. I can imagine how her cheerful and energetic personality would lend itself easily to collaborations but Mark works just as well solo as she does collaboratively: “When you get lonely, you want to call somebody and when you get sick of people you want to be alone. It’s like real life.”
It’s not likely the boisterous singer/songwriter will be lonely anytime soon, considering her packed tour schedule. It starts with a run through Alberta and B.C. with Rodney DeCroo and His Convictions. DeCroo and Mark are sharing a band, with Mark playing piano for DeCroo and DeCroo partaking in the singing duties for Mark’s set. It’s those onstage moments that really motivate Mark to spend all those hours creating in the studio.
“I like the nerdy figuring it out part,” she says, “but mostly you gotta have something to do on the stage. I’m a performer. It’s not like this burning passion that I have to get my words out, it’s more like ‘Well, you gotta do something up there. What are you gonna do?’” Even though, as she’s happy to admit, Mark is more of a performer, there were moments in her past where music shifted everything. “As an adult, it was going to see Jr. Gone Wild. I had the feeling like ‘Ahhhhhhh’” she explains, making a “religious epiphany” noise. “I finally heard the music that I thought would be out there. The sound — it was, like, this perfect sound.”
And so she’ll go back to the arduous work of making an album with NQ Arbuckle in December. “And then [I’ll] take over the world one drink at a time!” Mark says, laughter ringing down the telephone line.
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