please turn off your dance music

this, if i know me, may well end up as one of those meandering and utterly pointless exercises in the documentation of catching up with all the other cool kids. so i may as well just come right out and admit that until last year sometime, i was not familiar with the work of julie doiron.
i am sorry. does that help? to be fair, i'm really the one who's been missing out, not you. trust me, i'm boring at shows. i wouldn't buy you a whiskey. and i just shuffle there, with my arms folded. getting into the music, y'know?

well. now i'm clued in. of course i'd heard doiron's name before, and that of her previous band, eric's trip. considering the copious stacks of indie material i accumulate, it would have been an act of will to avoid hearing about them. but, as so often happens when other bands fall to the wayside of some other obsession du jour, i never actually got around to listening.
until last fall (?–this date may be erroneous, can anyone remember when i got the big pwelverum & sun order? that's when; yknow, for those keeping track...), that is. that's when i got the mount eerie/julie doiron/fred squire record, "lost wisdom." i listened to it one time, and thought, not for the last time, "my god. i truly have a shitty needle on my record player." however, i also at this time downloaded a recording of many of these songs performed at the 2008 primavera sound festival, at the parc del forum in barcelona. (if said recording is still up on archive: get it.) i have listened to this recording any times, and am here to tell you, it is damned swoonable. the set features julie doiron's earthily fresh voice prominently, whereupon she compliments the weary boyish voice of phil elvrum to a remarkably effective degree, particularly with a strong-yet-empathic forwardness to his reticence. what was even more remarkable, was the song breaks, though, when this sensual and masterly voice broke into the most girlish giggles imaginable, ephervescent without being "bubbly," belying not a ditziness, but a great and holistic joy.
determined to delve more deeply into the discography of this person, i was distracted almost immediately by something else. that something was probably related to one of the three ridiculous eps that the mountain goats have recently, semmingly grudgingly released. i accept that i have a problem, can we move on? once i remembered that there were other albums in the world that desperately required my acquisition, i began to think about julie doiron again. as if by the intervention of fate itself, i "had" to order something from jagjaguwar/secretly canadian/dead oceans anyway, and thought, oh, i should get some julie stuff too! i imagine since i have been out of work, small labels and distributors have been starving...
so there i found myself ordering a handful of julie doiron cds, and sat back for the refreshingly old-school label to take the order, find the discs, pack and mail them, all without the urgent reassurances of normal e-commerce. i had to wait a little, and i must say, it actually whetted my appetite. not that i'd want to do that all the time though...
eventually, "broken girl," "lonliest in the morning," "goodnight nobody," and "i woke myself up" arrived at my door, and found their way into rotation on my stereo, with "broken girl" asserting itself most surely. sadly, i missed ordering the most recent album, "i can wonder what you did with your day," my order placed a week shy of its release. i figured then that i would order it in a month or so, but then i found myself out of work. it leads the list of "things to buy when re-employed," a long list, i'm afraid. happily, the wealth of material on these recordings is immensely satisfying, and is work i go back to often for inspiration, but also for its sheer beauty. much has been written about the qualities of julie doiron's voice and material, so i won't re-remark on those, but i will say she was one of my happiest discoveries of last year, and would certainly urge anyone to look into her work. for an easy first step, daytrotter has a lovely set from this year's sxsw session. or you could check out julie's site, which features taster-mp3s from a good portion of her work. oh, and there are lots of those youtube thingees.
i found the experience of searching out julie doiron's work, and the resulting rewards, as being akin to going out to the grey and cooly damp woods, with heavy boots, and and a sturdy vest over a wool sweater, to hunt for wild mushrooms, turning corners to find wild, beautiful and delicious growths nestled in unexpected places. happy foraging.