For Julie Doiron, happiness is a loud guitar

By Jennifer Kelly
Published: March 10th, 2009 | 4:35am

You always know exactly how Julie Doiron is feeling when she makes her records. The emotion is right there in her direct and personal songs, raw and unvarnished and undeniable. For I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day (Jagjaguwar), Doiron simply says that she was very happy. “I was walking around and noticing how lucky I am. It was very different from some of my other albums, where I was having a really hard time figuring out how to be happy.”

The new album is louder than previous Doiron solo efforts, lacing songs like “Spill Yer Lungs” and “Consolation Prize” with buzzing undertones of electric guitar and bass. “I wanted to treat the songs exactly how I thought they should be treated,” Doiron explains. “If we felt they should be louder or there should be louder guitar parts or more drums, we should be able to do that.”

Fans of Doiron’s early work will immediately notice similarities to the music Doiron made as a teenager in the 1990s with the noisy, lo-fi Eric’s Trip. I Can Wonder, produced by Eric’s Trip’s Rick Bass, shares the sharp dynamic contrasts and fierce independence of that groundbreaking band, though Doiron has been evolving both personally and artistically since her early experiences with the band. “I was so young in Eric’s Trip and so timid and so shy that about the only thing that I really took out of that was how to get on stage and play really loud and not care what anyone thought,” she says. “But I did learn how to do what you want to do — and not let record labels or whatever’s popular at the time affect you — from Eric’s Trip. With Eric’s Trip, everything we wanted to do, we did it exactly the way we wanted to do it. I might not have ever learned that had I not been in Eric’s Trip.”

When the band broke up in 1996, Doiron began making hushed and personal solo albums, first as Broken Girl and later under her own name. That quieter solo work came out of her experience as a young mother. Doiron already had one baby and another on the way when the band broke up. (Her kids are now 14, 12, and 6.) Like many young mothers, she got most of her work done during nap times, so she wrote and sang quiet music so as not to wake her children.

A more amplified, Juno award–winning collaboration with the Wooden Stars in 2000 whetted Doiron’s appetite for rocking out, as did her 2005 work on 2007's Woke Myself Up with the French band Herman Dune. At the same time, Doiron’s live performance was becoming increasingly loud as she interspersed subdued materials with electric distortion and guitar solos. The new album reflects both sides of Doiron, with sparse acoustic tunes alongside rockers.

She explains that the album’s volume and its air of happiness are due, at least in part, to her musical and romantic partnership with Fred Squire. The two of them met when Doiron was playing in Shotgun & Jaybird. Always nervous about improvising, Doiron got courage — and a sense of adventure — from her new boyfriend. “Fred really encouraged me to have fun playing music,” she says. “If you’re trying to do a guitar solo and you hit the wrong notes, well hit the wrong notes and play them even harder.”

Doiron and Squire have a long-distance relationship, she in Montreal, he a 14-hour bus ride away in New Brunswick. I Can Wonder’s song “Nice to Come Home” describes this apart-but-together situation. “That song is basically about wondering what Fred’s up to,” Doiron admits. “After I got home from practicing, it was snowing and I was getting home in the middle of the winter when it’s really dark at 4 o’clock, and I’m just wondering what he’s up to.”

Soon, Doiron will be able to tell what her boyfriend is doing just by looking across the tour van or to the other side of the stage, as the pair embarks on a series of shows in North America this spring. “I’m glad to be alive,” she will sing, in her fresh, direct voice, against the clangor of amplified guitars, happy and loud at last.

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