It you were to take a look at the Top 40 these days, you might come to the conclusion that storytelling has fallen out of fashion. Songs of profound meaning have been replaced with profound hooks. It’s more efficient to bring in a dozen producers and songwriters to work out which two words to chant for a song-long chorus, than it is to burn out your soul on life. The Jens Lekmans, Joni Mitchells and Leonard Cohens of the world are few and far between. Fortunately Newfoundland has Jenina MacGillivray. Marion, MacGillivray’s debut album, mastered and arranged by Jose Contraras of By Divine Right, is storytelling at its finest, handily wrapped in melodies that were made for falling in love with.
“Yeah, I can’t seem to break away from the ol’ narrative structure,” laughs MacGillivray.
From the opening track, “Carvoeiro,” it’s clear the album has an intimately autobiographical tone to it. It’s loosely tied together with the common thread being MacGillivray’s life experiences. It’s a beautiful journey, if not an obviously linear one.
“No one wants to hear the song about your engagement in Portugal at a house party sing along,” jokes MacGillivray about the album’s opening track.
“Let me say a few cliché things about me and you, but for us they’re not clichés because they are all true.”
There’s an awareness and sensitivity to her lyrics that hint to the rest of us that’ve we’ve been living our lives like some obtuse rocks, unable to fully appreciate the world around us in any way that would do the experience justice. We’ve taken for granted all the moments that MacGillivray has somehow sashayed through with a poignant grace.
“They kind of go from heartache to grief and death, but yeah, there are still friends, and travel, and lots of nice things, and there is still love,” explains MacGillivray. “I’m a romantic. I feel like the album is so densely packed with actual details from my life it’s kind hard to know where to start.”
At no point is the album more personal as when MacGillivary sings of her mother who passed away suddenly in 2016. The titular figure finds herself in many songs, beginning with “Coal Mining Town,” the first song MacGillivray wrote for the album, and “Marion,” which MacGillivrary wrote last.
“[She was] definitely the first person really close to me that I lost like that. The closest person, really.”
It all ties into what MacGillivray half-jokingly describes as the “death and dying portion of the evening.” It’s a theme that gets revisited in “Some Day We’ll All Be Dead,” and “Holy Winter” about the time MacGillivrary almost bit the dust during a blackout in St. John’s.
“I think writing songs is kind of therapy for me sometimes. Like, after my Mom died I wrote ‘Marion’ and it helped my get a handle on it and played it a million times and cried every time,” says MacGillivray. “Somehow writing down the specific details helped. The hard thing to do is to make specific details relatable to other people – I mean I do that a lot – add in specific details – and hope it’s still relatable.
“I try to show the balance of harder things and amazing things – like we get to be alive, to travel, have friends, listen to music, make coffee. Love, grief, death, rock, skipping, birds. Ya know? Life. I basically try to give people the whole gambit of human emotion in an hour. Cry – Bouzouki – Dance. That’s a good live show for me.”
Marion gently meanders from the Cohen-esque song-writing of “Carvoeiro” to “Olden Days,” reminiscent of Lou Reed’s rock and roll love song “Romeo Had Juliet,” to the Burning Hell-referencing “Skipping Stones.” Full of authenticity and charm, this might be the most beautiful album of 2018.
Tour Dates:
11.24.18 – Charlottetown, PEI @ Back Alley Music
11.26.18 – Charlottetown, PEI @ Pour House