DANA WYLIE BAND

Dana Wylie is small. Petite. Short of stature. If you wanted to be condescending, you could call her elfin. Pocket-sized. She impersonated the French singer Édith Piaf in a Fringe show called Tempo de Java a few years ago, and she may be the first person ever to play Piaf who had to worry about looking too short for the role. Wylie knows all this: when she released her charming debut CD Almost There, she created her own boutique label and called it Tiny White Girl Records.

"I read The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet a couple of years ago," she says, "and I discovered quite profoundly that I am Piglet! I totally had that Piglet syndrome of ‘Oh, I can’t do that, I’m just a small animal.’ And I’ve realized it’s something I really need to get over and get past."

Wylie’s de-Pigletization process took her first from Edmonton, where she had been a busy actress and cabaret performer, to Taiwan. There she worked, not very successfully, as an ESL teacher while picking up side gigs performing with a children’s theatre troupe and singing with, of all things, a bluegrass band. She came back to Edmonton briefly to act in Northern Light Theatre’s musical Water’s Daughter, and went to England to live with her new boyfriend Jez Hellard, whom she first met in a music shop back in Taiwan. Together, they got a lot of work playing the pub circuit north of London, but with Wylie’s visa running out and the suspicion growing that they weren’t making any career progress, they decided to relocate to Canada, where Wylie says things seem "more musically possible." They now live, appropriately enough, in Biggar, Saskatchewan.

Hallard and Wylie recorded Almost There in the U.K., but the lyrics undeniably have their roots in Canada, what with song titles like "Even in Saskatchewan," the descriptions of wintry landscapes painted in varying shades of brown, and a loosely structured songwriting style reminiscent of Joni Mitchell.

"People tell me it sounds like Rickie Lee Jones too," Wylie says, "and I can see that, although I’d never heard anything by her when I made the album. I think what people are really hearing, more than anything, is the theatre influence. When I started writing songs, I wasn’t even listening to anything in pop culture, or even folk music–I was listening to musicals. I mean, that was my life! And I found that in all my early songs, I needed to play a character or have them take some kind of big dramatic arc. It took a while to realize a song didn’t have to do that. We’ll see how the second disc turns out."

Dana Wylie... Andrea House... Sheri Somerville... Are we reaching a point where every Edmonton actress is required to record at least two albums? Jocelyn Ahlf and Celina Stachow, you’d better get to work!