Photography David Waldman

You can tell a lot about a man by the kind of canine company he keeps. And Timber, Taylor Kirk’s shaggy black Labradoodle, whose bushy eyebrows and helicopter tail evoke the most magical creatures produced by Jim Henson, has a lot in common with his best friend.

Timber is delighted by the simplest pleasures — why go to the trouble of humping someone’s leg when you can be happy methodically chewing the bark off a small stick? He’s gentle, quiet, somewhat goofy and focused, with a grace that belies his size. Aside from the stick-chomping, these qualities are shared by Kirk, the musician behind gothic blues-folk act Timber Timbre. (The band came first; the name seemed tailor-made for the dog.)

Blinking in the midday sun, Taylor Kirk is in his element as he grins at a pack of pooches that gallop around us at the top of High Park’s Dog Hill. It’s strange to think of this shy, guarded figure as the mastermind behind Timber Timbre’s haunting and arresting performances. He’s a tall, delicate-yet-rugged young guy, one who seems like he’d be more at home on a campsite than in a rock club.

It’s disorienting to encounter Kirk in the light of day. As Timber Timbre, he concocts eerie, after-dark soundscapes. His songs seem to rise out of misty graveyards on walls of quivering organ. They quietly ensnare you in a tangled mess of cobwebby guitar chords, echo with shrill cries like a murder of crows in a far-off field and teeter down country roads with clattering percussion that could have come from the sounds of chattering teeth and knocking knees. Kirk’s tales of dismantled cults and decomposing lovers are so convincing that you half expect him to resemble some wizened oracle, a ghost who prowls the world after dusk in search of redemption.

“Taylor can be such a reserved person,” says Stuart Duncan, who originally released Timber Timbre on his Out Of This Spark label in January. (This week’s record release party celebrates the album’s re-release on Arts & Crafts, a bigger company that will put his disc in more hands.) “And knowing him and interacting with him at that level off the stage, I think I still find myself somewhat surprised when I see the transformation that happens [when he performs]. I mean, it’s not a jarring, black and white kind of thing, but I think he comes out of his shell a bit when he’s on stage.

“The first times I saw him,” Duncan recalls, “I found it remarkable how his music catches people and captivates the audience. It sounds clichéd, but it really makes you stop and pay attention, and think that is a somewhat rare trait for live musicians.”

The voice of Timber Timbre is a swampy growl, somewhere between a tenor bullfrog and a heartland preacher. When he speaks, though, Kirk could be any other sweet, soft-spoken twentysomething film school grad.

“I feel like I’ve tried a lot of things to make my voice sound like an instrument or something I can get behind,” he explains. “It’s definitely an affectation. To an extent, I don’t want to sound like myself. I guess I kinda want to differentiate myself from other acts. Or I don’t want to sound like a white dude who’s trying to sing blues music or something. I don’t know that it’s a character, but it’s a way of separating myself.”

That statement might provide insight into the process behind Timber Timbre’s songs.
According to Kirk, many of his lyrics are inspired by romanticized memories of his hometown. He grew up near Brooklin, Ontario, a small town just north of Whitby. These days, he finds himself yearning for the country, but as a teenager he felt restless and resentful. “I didn’t understand having to maintain land — what that was about, or how it was valuable.” Now, he says, “I like the idea of working to achieve simpler goals.”

His dad kept a drum kit in the basement; as a kid, Kirk would amble downstairs and bash away at it. Later, he learned to play guitar with his father’s jam band and started sketching out songs on his own.

He allows that his music has been shaped by many things, from the Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd tunes he listened to in his teens to his experience writing film scores in university. After studying film at OCAD, Kirk abandoned cinema for music because it felt like a more effective form of expression, but he maintains that his songs are more about creating atmosphere than telling stories.

“Some people talk about songwriting like the songs are coming from a song god or something, like they just shoot down,” he chuckles softly. “But it’s never really been like that for me. It’s always been really deliberate. So when I’d write something, I’d try to avoid the obvious patterns. I never came up with anything that was so brilliant.”

He laughs.

 “I think I just wanted to be The Beach Boys, essentially. I wanted to make exciting pop music with as many funny chord changes as possible. I eventually realized you’re not gonna be reinventing the wheel or anything, and I decided to just let things happen and fall into natural progressions. I feel good about where that’s taken things.”

In some ways, the songs on Timber Timbre lie at the opposite end of the spectrum from those on Pet Sounds, which Kirk lovingly calls “the most saccharine pop music you can make.” But as the clip-clop rhythms and swooning arrangements of a tune like “God Only Knows” mask Brian Wilson’s melancholy heart, Kirk uses eerie arrangements and mournful moans to convey heartfelt, hopeful ideas.

On one of the album’s standout tracks, “Lay Down In The Tall Grass,” for example, the speaker imagines himself as a corpse, haunted by spectral visions. It sounds spooky, but the message is tender:

“I dreamt you found me out in a field,” Kirk murmurs. “You tripped over my site / and you dug me out of this shallow grave / with your Swiss Army knife. / And only you could revive me, so badly decomposed; / I was born white, dry and scaly / but you still took me home.”

“I guess I create a dark setting to illuminate something,” Kirk says. “If we start somewhere really dark, then… those hopeful moments are even more intense.”

The macabre imagery of that tune is representative of the rest of the album, whose themes include mortality, illness, corporeal state and transcendence, wrapped in Kirk’s beautifully rendered prose. These weighty topics come from a very real place; he wrote many of the songs while someone very close to him was grappling with serious illness.

Though understandably protective of the experience, he acknowledges that it was crucial in shaping the record.

“That’s part of the darkness,” he says slowly. “[A theme of the album is being] a bit resentful or angry about having to deal with the situation and people’s reaction. I also feel really compassionate toward that perspective, because I think it takes dealing with this kind of experience to have any kind of comfort with it. But I guess you have expectations of people to be supportive….”

He trails off. “I think the frustration is initially with the general perception of death or illness. I struggled with it myself, just in terms of being afraid of hospitals. Then I essentially lived in a hospital for a while, to be available.”

On his first two albums, 2006’s Cedar Shakes and 2007’s Medicinals, Kirk experimented with raw, fragmented country-folk elements, producing evocative compositions anchored by primal chants, found sounds and unusual percussion. (“I never wanted to record with drums before,” he offers, “so it was always banging on the floor or clapping or whatever. I felt like drums required bass and then bass required… everything. And with the scale I was working on, it felt like it would just complicate the recording.)”

Timber Timbre shifts from the previous albums’ folk-based sound to something else, an aesthetic rooted in swampy, ragged blues. Kirk notes that he wanted to work with more straightforward sounds and instruments, and gradually embraced the idea of collaborating with producer Chris Stringer. Kirk’s earlier recordings were intimate affairs, made in the privacy of his own home; this album marks the first time the singer-songwriter invited someone else into the process.

“I consciously didn’t want to make another weird folk recording,” he says matter-of-factly. “I feel like I’m not the type of artist that’s gonna be honing my sound so much. I still feel like my temperament will always be based in folk music, but I’d rather make a different recording and try different things on with each record.”

For his next project, Kirk wants to try making a traditional rock ’n’ roll record in the vein of Bo Diddley or Chuck Berry. (His pal Matt Cully, a member of local gospel-rockers Bruce Peninsula and an organizer of ’50s DJ night Goin’ Steady, has made him some mixtapes as inspiration.) That aesthetic may be a giant leap from the scratchy, broken-down folk of Cedar Shakes, but Kirk is excited to tackle something completely new, even if it means reinventing himself from show to show.

“That’s something about this tradition of pop music,” he sighs. “It can become so much like karaoke. I don’t think I’m the type of person who could do that night after night. I feel like every show needs to be its own spectacle, something different has to happen each time.”

Not that Kirk has become jaded about performing live. He explains that the first time he took over the mic to sing his own songs during a show with Adam Cotton at the Rivoli, it was “pretty much the most terrifying thing, ever.”

“Actually,” he says slowly, “I still experience that at every show. It’s only now, six or seven years later, that it’s starting to feel more comfortable, but it never feels like a natural thing. It still feels really like maybe the most unnatural thing for me to be doing, which is maybe why I do it.

“I just feel like it’s important to force yourself to do things that you’re not comfortable with.”