Christine Fellows: Burning Daylight

Burning Daylight is not just the sixth full-length release from Winnipeg, Manitoba’s Christine Fellows, it’s also a book. In fact, the disc and the book are bundled together, featuring music, poetry and art, the latter courtesy of visual artist Alicia Smith. While I cannot comment on the printed word, as I only received a digital download of just the album, Burning Daylight, the music, is inspired by Canada’s North. In February 2011, Fellows was the songwriter-in-residence for the Dawson City Music Festival in the Yukon Territory, and she wound up taking to the stories of Jack London. She felt spurned to create music based around his work. Two years later, Fellows found herself in Nunavut as part of a National Film Board crew where she met Smith. The pair began exchanging poems and collages, and a book project took shape around the songs. Thus, Burning Daylight has artistic ambition that crosses beyond just music, but into the realm of the written word.

So what about the music then? Well, Burning Daylight is built around saloon-style piano ditties that are reminiscent of Matthew Friedberger’s work with the Fiery Furnaces. Images of winter, cold temperatures and frost abound in this suite of 14 songs, making it the perfect backdrop for such days when they become short and a coating of white covers the land. (A nice touch: “To Build a Fire” features the crackling sounds of wood burning in the background.) Indeed, much of this material sounds icy and glacial, and you’ll need to throw a few logs into the furnace and put on a cup of hot cocoa to best appreciate it. While these songs don’t really distinguish themselves from other baroque folk tunes of the same nature done by other artists, you do have to enjoy and appreciate the painterly strokes that Fellows weaves with her music. The music is eerie, haunting and, often times, gorgeous, though its nippy beauty really takes a few listens to in order to best get at what Fellows is doing here. Many of the songs, too, feel like poems, running just a minute or two in length, also making this something of a song cycle or concept record. Overall, Burning Daylight is a likeable record, and even though you can spit in Canada and it’ll land on a folk musician, the record does display Fellows’ talents quite vividly and this album will be of particular interest to those who long for the cold and want to know more about Canada’s Arctic heritage.