ISLA CRAIG: NOT OF THIS WORLD

To hear Isla Craig tell it, she wasn’t spit out into this world a mewling, puking infant like regular folks, but hatched as an embryonic collection of notes, chords and melodies that was lovingly crafted, sanded and shaped into a producer of rather magical music. Born to a piano and vocal instructor mom and a father who builds guitars by hand and played guitar in a bluegrass band, Craig claims she grew up falling asleep to the faint strains of “Les Misérables and all those Andrew Lloyd Webber songs” as they filtered through her house.

“From the day I was born, it was bred into me,” explains the Toronto-based vocalist, performer and songwriter. “My parents moved to New Brunswick after my father retired at age 60, and he builds guitars in a shop in their house, which overlooks the Miramichi river. It’s an incredible thing, building instruments — I think it makes you more connected to music in this profound way. Watching him when I was growing up was amazing. He’s really obsessive in the way he works, which is a quality I have.

“I really didn’t have a choice with music,” she adds. “It’s just in me.”

If Craig inherited her meticulous attention to detail — best seen in the intricate mandala designs that have consumed her visual art practice of late — from her dad, her mother passed down a strong belief in the holistic power of music. (“She was more of a mentor than a teacher,” Craig offers.)

It may sound a bit flaky to those who come from a more cerebral (or cynical) place, but Craig has an unapologetic investment in, as she describes it, “music as a healing thing.” Though she spent her early years absorbing classical training, the singer-songwriter eschewed further Conservatory studies, choosing instead to focus on formal schooling in visual art and channelling her love of music into free-form compositions.

Her new album, Isla Craig and the Continental Drift, is expansive and textured, with Craig’s airy vocal swells providing a neat thread of continuity through a collection of tracks that shift incrementally and easily from hovering bumblebee drones (opener “Click Clack”) and dark, rumbling, bluesy laments (“Sea Chamber”) to more complicated exercises in polyrhythmic African-inspired jams (“Birds In Flight”) and even reggae (a lovely and surprisingly solid cover of Bunny Wailer’s “Dreamland”).

“I’m a huge hip-hop fan, but I also love Maria Callas,” insists Craig. “I make no distinction between the two. I’m really interested in melody and flow — I’d become an MC if I could — and I just follow the melody wherever it takes me.”

Craig credits the “virtuosos” who make up her Continental Drift band (guitarist Colin Fisher, drummer Brandon Valdivia and bassist Michael Smith, among others, all of whom are active in T.O.’s experimental/avant-garde scene) with helping shape the specific moods of her songs. 

“It sounds hokey,” she says, “but the thing that threads us all together is our interest in freedom through music. I wanted to create a simple place that was very open for people to enter into, and my approach is to break things down to their simplest parts. The guys I play with build it all back up.

“The record is made up of things I’d worked on for a while — I vamp on the piano or play chords on the guitar, or I’m on my bike and an idea comes…. I only started writing with the band recently. They’re so great, the guys I play with. I consider myself a vocalist first and foremost, and it’s so nice to have that blanket beneath me. They’re like a really beautiful afghan.”

In addition to helping malleable would-be artists find their voice, Craig’s talented mom is an organist, which meant that young Isla spent many reverent hours immersed in the sound of pipe organ chords echoing off vaulted church ceilings. The experience left her with a lasting appreciation of the open, resonant acoustics of ecclesiastical spaces.

That’s part of what led Craig to choose an intimate church on Toronto Island as the setting for this weekend’s CD release show. Considering the almost coastal ebb and flow and natural textures of Craig’s music, it’s fitting to think of enraptured city kids making the trek across the lake in a ferry, then gathering in a place of worship to celebrate these songs.

“I liked the idea that people had to make a little journey to get there,” Craig says, smiling. “Not because I’m difficult, but… seeing shows for me, I’m fully and completely there, which feels like a big difference from the way things usually work in clubland. And the space on the Island works really well with what the band have been doing. I’m also excited because I have this local Georgian choir [Darbazi] opening up, and I’m so interested in the way those voices will sound in the church.

“I’d like to work toward doing shows that are more organic in their spaces, especially because I’m particularly interested in early vocal music and a capella music, which are much more stripped down. I find it difficult to get the sounds I like out of extremely amplified concrete basements,” she adds. “I’m interested in the sound of the church — it’s almost an instrument, like the sixth member of the band or something.”