About

WOODLAND SONGSTRESS SHELLEY O’BRIEN RELEASES THIRD ALBUM, TURN THE DARK

Since the release of her debut album You, Me and the Birds (2009), and Vivarium (2011), Shelley O’Brien has taken her ukulele and her ethereal pop songs to festivals in Paris, Venice, Helsinki, Melbourne, Tokyo and Rome, and has toured in Iceland, Holland, Spain and Germany. Her songs have been featured on MTV and ABC.

Turn the Dark, her new album with producer/mixer Jace Lasek (Besnard Lakes), began to come into view while O’Brien was living in a tent in Dawson City during the summer of 2012. The vast northern landscape became the background and inspiration for songs that distil memory and feeling to the bare essentials.

O’Brien began her career at the piano, writing melancholic songs rooted in nature and the deep yet fleeting experiences of love and alone-ness. Ukulele added an intimate, playful sound to her palette, and brought her into contact with an international community of devotees of this resurgent instrument. On Turn the Dark, O’Brien also plays bass and percussion.

The album offers a rich glimpse into the nature of love, from the giddy spin of first love in Spring Drum, to the question of taking a chance in Truth Is. Snow in Shangri-La is a haunting wintery fable about loyalty and betrayal. The enigmatic ballad The Only Way Out tells of loneliness and communion with nature, while the luminous Juniper is a response to the harsh beauty of northern mountains. Album opener Turn The Dark is the record’s redemption song:

“Watch me turn this darkness inside out, well the stars do burn, and the suns do shout. Lift up the sky and shake it all out, and we’ll begin.”
​Jace Lasek (Besnard Lakes) added his mixing wizardry to provide the lush ambiance of the record. Ukulele-cello duo James Hill and Anne Janelle provide string arrangements.

O’Brien grew up in a northern mountain town in British Columbia, where her poet-father often left scraps of spontaneous poetry for her at the breakfast table. The pine-scented woodland of her childhood has remained the driving impetus for her creativity. She spent 2 years living in Japan, performed for several seasons on cruise ships, and settled in Toronto in 2009.

Layered and often cinematic, O’Brien’s songs alight on the innermost branches of the
human heart. The underlying pulses of solitude and desperation are there, but they are always countered with reprises of hope, gratitude and prayer. Turn The Dark is a call to love, in all its forms.

The new record will be celebrated on May 14, 2014 at Gallery 345 in Toronto.