Julie Doiron

Fri Oct 15

Meow Meow

320 SE 2nd Ave

As hard as I try, it’s difficult to discuss the music of Julie Doiron without conjuring images of maternity–a slope made all the more slippery with the inevitability of terms like “singer/songwriter” and “earnest.” This is, admittedly, a little insensitive, but it’s a near insurmountable obstacle when attempting to engage a reader in the brilliance of a performer when faced with a triumvirate powerful enough to tickle even my mother’s Joni Mitchell gag reflex. It’s unjust, but the singularity of motherhood can be incredibly alienating fodder for pop music–but against popular assumption, Doiron mines motherhood in ways that speak a universal tongue.

Since the mid-’90s dissolution of Eric’s Trip–the near-legendary Canadian lo-fi band she joined at 18–Doiron has quietly crafted a string of discreet, critically acclaimed folk-pop records under both her own name and that of Broken Girl. The records–first released on her own Sappy Records imprint, then later on Sub Pop (home of Eric’s Trip) and Jagjaguwar–were a studied reduction of her previous Eric’s Trip presence, which was largely a fuzz-backed, coy darkness. Her early works (the self-titled Broken Girl LP and its follow-up, Loneliest in the Morning) were quaintly twee lo-fi excursions in the Softies vain–at the time more notable for their sonic dissimilarity with Eric’s Trip than their consistency in songwriting.

It was also about this time that Doiron began to breed–the strains of her maternal bond webbing her work with an unlikely urgency–and with each subsequent record the quality of her craft has improved exponentially. Her latest album, the gorgeous Goodnight Nobody, is arguably her most accomplished to date–the bare candor of her words reaching a faultless balance of poetry and simplicity. What at first play out like simple songs of love and desperation, her portraits reveal themselves to be blanketed in the sweetness of motherhood–a place where the triviality of a love song feels bronzed in warm resolve. Doiron’s patient, lilting words defy the typical disposability inherent in the emotions of love songs, as they connect with a place not usually suitable for pop music–a mother’s womb.