All Things Bright And Beautiful | On her new album Beautiful World, Eliza Gilkyson celebrates mankind's potential for change..
DETAILS
ELIZA GILKYSON
St. Basil’s Cultural Centre (10819-71 Ave). Fri, Apr 17 (7:30pm). Tickets: $20 at the door, $17 advance, available through TIX on the Square (420-1757/tixonthesquare.ca).
Listening to songwriter Eliza Gilkyson speak about her music is like listening to an environmental engineer passionately talk about the metaphysical properties of microbial biotechnology. There’s a structured formality about it that often goes over my head, but at the same time, Gilkyson doesn’t talk at me, she talks to me, inviting me in to the world of her humanitarian ideas. Plus, if there’s one thing I find refreshing, it’s somebody sincerely talking about something they love as if it were out of their control.
“I get up every day and I feel that my work is at one with my desire to facilitate a deeper understanding of where we are in history and who we are,” Gilkyson says. “And even talking to someone like you, I feel like I’m doing something about it. But make no mistake: it’s not that I’m not helpful, but my hit on reality right now is that it is too late for us to float through what is coming. I think we should start emotionally preparing for what is coming so that we can be of service instead of just freaked out by it.”
Gilkyson’s talking about how human beings are going to adapt to the changes we are forcing on our planet, and in her new album Beautiful World, she portrays us as both the cause of these problems and their solution. She mixes pragmatic optimism with pessimistic realism within each song. Yes, that’s a lot to chew but when you have such a vast body of work like Gilkyson, your ideas tend to mature alongside your technical abilities.
“Over time, writing songs is a process for me,” Gilkyson says. “Be it a process of me working through an emotional state or I’m trying to digest a lot of information on a topic and I’m trying to turn it into something. There is always a process going on that has a cathartic sense to it and that catharsis is in every one of my records. It’s pushing the envelope about what it is you know and understanding the world around you. It’s pushing yourself to learn more and be more self-aware. If I’m not challenging myself, I start to get restless and I feel stuck. Fortunately, I have a busy mind that needs to be working.”
Some may not care for Gilkyson’s folksy ways. She may just sound like another hippie singing about hippie things while spewing starry-eyed “save the world” rhetoric. But when you have people like Joan Baez and Steve Earle naming Gilkyson their contemporary, it behooves you to take her seriously.
“The end is the start of something new,” Gilkyson says. “Everything from economics to agriculture, we are going to have to change these bigger systems. Patriarchy, white supremacy, corporate capitalism — all these things are systems that are done with. What we have to do it look at what is going to take their place and how we are going to deal with the collapse of those things. Other people may see me as a bit doom-and-gloomy but the way I see it is that this is a world worth fighting for.”
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