Little Frogs Sarah Harmer [Official Video]
It’s been a while — 10 years, to be exact — since the veteran Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah Harmer turned a full album loose.
Plans for new music sometimes popped up in interviews as the 2010s unfolded, but she’s more often been throwing her weight behind activist efforts. She headed up an environmental advocacy group to protect the Niagara Escarpment,
protested pipelines, and occasionally played benefit shows to hype ranked-choice voting and oppose water protection rollbacks. But the songs will out in the end, and here they are; “Are You Gone,” out Friday on Canadian label Arts and Crafts, opens up like a scrapbook of postcards from the past decade as she experienced it.
Even when Harmer isn’t singing out a slogan, a current of resistance sparks up in her songs. She most directly channels her activist bent with “New Low,” an earnest nugget of protest-pop inspired by the 2017.
The natural world is as integral to many of these songs as her seemingly ageless smoky-tea voice, or the little accents of twangy or tropical guitar that bloom behind her vocals.
Then there’s “Just Get Here,” originally released two years ago on a compilation tribute to the late poet Al Purdy. As she looks through a crow’s eyes at Purdy’s storied A-frame cottage, a gathering place for scores of writers, she unfurls the most gorgeous melody of the album, if not her entire career.
The natural world is as integral to many of these songs as her seemingly ageless smoky-tea voice, or the little accents of twangy or tropical guitar that bloom behind her vocals.
The JUNO award-winning singer-songwriter and activist with platinum sales in Canada, releases her sixth studio album: Are You Gone . After a decade, Sarah Harmer returns with an extremely personal and political collection of songs motivated by the beauty of life, the urgency of the climate crisis and loss. His vibrant music has stood out within alt-country, folk / roots, and contemporary adult. Sarah began her career in the 1990s by being part of the cult band Weeping Tile.
Harmer wrote Are You Gone gradually over the past decade as he went about his “day job.” Between the citizen organization PERL (Protecting Escarpment Rural Land) and the leadership of a coalition to prevent a construction, she became a fixture in local politics and advocacy, while keeping her musical skills
fresh by writing and playing casually with friends. . Finally, in 2019, reflecting on the “ghosts” of loss, the gluttony of capitalism, and the potential of music as a public platform, Sarah began work on what would
be her most sophisticated album to date. Melancholic ballads, piano and acoustic guitars accompany this material that is felt necessary in times of crisis.
Harmer came up with the title of the album when he spent a summer night at Canadian poet Al Purdy’s country home, which served as a writers’ haven in rural Ontario in 1960. time, time capsules, and the double need for isolation and community ”, recalls the composer.
