IN CONCERT
What: Sarah Harmer
Where: Capital Ballroom
When: Saturday, 9 p.m. (doors at 8)
Tickets: $48.25 (incl. charges) from admitone.com
Sarah Harmer has been off the road for more than a decade, which is just long enough to forget some of the not-so-fun nuances of touring — such as bad food, restless sleep, early load-ins and late load-outs.
“It’s a lot of hauling gear,” Harmer said with a laugh, during a tour stopover in Fernie. “I’m largely a moving company. A small fraction of my time is singing, and a large part is hauling crap.”
Touring has been a very sporadic endeavour for Harmer, who stayed off the road for four years following the trek to support her 2005 album, I’m a Mountain. When tour dates to support its follow-up, 2010’s Oh Little Fire, were eventually off the books, she retreated once more. The intervening years were full of things largely unrelated to music, but Harmer said she never stopped playing for the sheer joy of it, or writing when she felt a surge of inspiration.
She eventually returned to making music and released her sixth album, Are You Gone, in 2020. She did a week of shows in the U.S. around the time of its release, but when the pandemic hit, Harmer returned to her home in the country just outside of Kingston, Ont., and enjoyed the forced quasi-vacation. Though she technically had a new album to promote — one that earned a 2021 Juno Award nomination for adult alternative album of the year — she spent two years gardening and reading books, before deciding to return to life as a professional musician once restrictions were lifted.
“I live a pretty small life, and don’t really think of myself as an out-there-in-the-world public performer for the most part. But that has been a part of my life previously. So it feels like I’m coming back to that a little bit.”
Harmer’s first proper tour in 10 years got underway two weeks ago, with her four-piece band and three-person crew in tow. Harmer said it was hard leaving the quietude of her home for a tour van with eight people inside (“I’m a bit of a homebody, for sure,” she joked), but being back out on the road has been wonderful thus far. “I like singing. I haven’t done it that much in the last decade, but it definitely feels like muscle memory has kicked in.”
Are You Gone is a remarkable achievement in many ways. Though more than two decades separate her latest album and her acclaimed debut, 2000’s You Were Here, the two-time Juno Award winner is in exquisitely fine voice, matching her acute observation skills as a songwriter. That in itself is surprising, to some degree, given that the songs span several years.
Some of the material has been bouncing around for a decade or more, Harmer said, while others — including What I Was To You, her ode to longtime friend late Tragically Hip frontman, Gord Downie — are newer. That gives the recording a live-in-feel, lyrically scattered though it may be. “I don’t think there’s one cohesive thing, or a general mood or sentiment that I was aiming for,” Harmer said.
“I’m a Mountain [was a record where] I wrote a lot of the songs in a short period of time. For this one, I do remember thinking when I was going in to record it, that the songs felt very fresh. There wasn’t a cohesion or feel that was happening when I was writing them, but after the fact, they had a certain feel to me. But what the hell that was, I don’t remember.”
Harmer said she needed many of these songs — which tackle loss, heartbreak, and environmental disaster — to get out, so she could forward emotionally. Now that she’s back on the road, after a decade away and with a new album to promote, she doesn’t expect future tours and recording sessions to endure such extensive delays.
“Being around music and musicians, and playing a show, being in that headspace makes me think I will try and focus on music for the next year. When you get the momentum going, it really fuels it.”
