It began just as a superstition, when I was a six-days-on-the-road musician: when the waxing moon would grin at us in the windshield on the way to the gig, I would say, “well it’s going to be a good night, there’s the half moon.”
You might want to research this for yourself, but for me, after 50 years, it has become a fact of music.
Even on a Tuesday, it will be a good night, for the band and for the audience.
The science proved itself once again as the June moon came beaming in through the window of the Southern Cross room at Toronto’s Tranzac Club last Tuesday.
That small, maroon-draped room has been serving as the dojo for
songwriter Justin Orok’s bi-monthly curated evenings all year, and this time around, he used the occasion to host a release party for his sweet California Shutters LP which came out Friday, May 30.
As tightly-packed-together as conceivably possible, the audience, primarily Gen-Z-plus, ended up overflowing into the hallway or settling for bums-on-the-carpet seating.
Many of them knew all of the lyrics already.
“The record is about the barriers between people,” he said.
“A lot of the songs are about pairs of people who want to connect, but for some reason they can’t. And the title song, ‘California Shutters,’ is about physical barriers, so I decided to make it the title track. Aside from that there’s no California content on the record. It’s like Blinds to Go got Joni Mitchell to write a jingle.”
The stories that he sings are rendered in an intimate tone, with peripheral details creating an ambience moreso than a narrative.
“A lot of them are inspired by films I’ve seen,” he said.
“When I was writing this record, I was watching a lot of Mike Leigh and Abbas Kiarostami movies. I do try to think like a novelist or a short story writer; I try to get this literary kind of structure across in a song, with named characters, and then later I’ll realize, ‘Oh this is about a very specific thing that happened in my life’. It’s a nice thing that writing can do, bringing out unconscious connections.”
The album itself is populated with an older set of musicians chosen for the studio, including claw hammer banjo star Chris Coole, renowned vocal sweeteners Felicity Williams and Maggie Keogh, exploratory violinist Aline Homzy, mood-altering vibraphonist Michael Davidson, and Tanya Tagaq’s drummer Jean Martin, who also produced the record.
For this iteration of the repertoire at the Tranzac, Justin conjured a one-time-only collection of musical supporters. The opening set by Potions, a soft-spoken collegial quartet of divergent sonic collaborators, set the perfect atmospherical tone for the acute ears of those assembled.
Deploying sustained close harmony and adroit melodic hypotheses, Potions alternated passages of hushed suspense and lush acoustic comfort in a set of lyrical, original guitar-based ballads, and ended with a cover of the title tune from Justin’s first album, Kanata.
They went on to back him for his set, with added help from his constant guitarist Ray Goudy (“who does what I do on guitar, only better”), downy soft vocalists Audrey Mae and Madelyn Kirby, and T.O. bass sensei Andrew Downing.
After opening with a Sarah Greene song from his covers EP, Debt, and mobilized by his musing, understated patter and immaculate finger-style guitar architecture, the album’s songs, about baseball, driving and wishing stones, rolled out smoothly, carefully articulated and freshly galvanized by the attentions of the assembled nonet.
The prevalent feeling created in the room was one of unanimity and cheer, the most potent qualities of inspirational momentum that music can ever offer an audience, especially when aligned with the added, ephemeral influence of a waxing quarter moon.
If you wish to listen to California Shutters, it can be found on all the usual streaming services; this is
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6jxSMgJ6iwEmsf2kmKkF
And the purchase link is here,
CD/digital: https://justinorok.bandcamp.com/album/california-shutters
