Nettwerk recording artist Shelley Campbell (formerly Auburn)
conjures images of life on the road & lost love with her unique blend
of atmospheric pop, traditional country & beyond.
Forget about the music, at least for now. Instead, find the heart of
Shelley Campbell through pictures lifted from her past.
Image 1: A high hilltop. Pleistocene fossils and arrowheads in the
earth underfoot. A vast blue sky overhead. Off toward one horizon, Toronto's
twinkling skyline. In the other direction, the furious mists and rainbows
of Niagara Falls. Between the two, deer bound over the farmland.
Image 2: A young girl joins in singing old time gospel songs with
the shirt-sleeved worshippers, their hands raised, swaying back and
forth. Lanterns burn in the summer night. The young girl's father smiling
approvingly.
Image 3: Black coffee. Scribbled notebooks. George Jones on the jukebox.
Waitresses weave through tables, serving food and comfort to the truckers.
Outside, diesels roar into the fathomless distance.
Image 4: An afternoon alone. The girl is a young woman now, stretched
across her bed, praying in the way of someone who is weary of prayer,
asking for a way out. At the same time, not far away, someone she doesn't
yet know decides he needs to find a singer for his band.
Autumn festivals around Indian campfires. Deep burgundy hair and granny
glasses in a sea of square-cut Bible students. Days spent chasing the
American Dream, nights passed sleeping in her car. Each image is a moment
from Shelley Campbell's life -- a life that plays through her remarkable
Nettwerk debut, Blue Ridge Reveille. Now you're ready to listen.
If you've spent any time in Vancouver, you've probably encountered
the fruits of her creative labor. For several years she has been at
the center of the city's RANCH Society, a collective of artists
gathered largely under her initiative to celebrate the virtues of what
some call Americana music. Bands like Radiogram, the Buttless
Chaps, and Circus in Flames mingled at RANCH events, played
at each other's gigs, recorded together, all to everyone's benefit.
Blue Ridge Reveille is in part a product of these activities.
Recorded in Shelley's living room, it's an album that's easy on the
ears yet grows richer and deeper with each repeated play. Surrounded
by RANCH colleagues from Bottleneck, Bughouse 5, Coal,
and Bocephus King and the Rigalattos, Shelley sings with
hypnotic eloquence. The music mixes alt rock and country; banjo, harmonica,
and harmonium weave around a guitar's electric blue twang. Each song
stretches out like a highway that runs from memory to possibility. It's
easy to imagine Shelley at the mic, eyes closed, letting each one take
her back to the episode that first moved her to write it. She began
absorbing the lessons of life in rural southern Ontario. Her parents
encouraged her to explore the woods and fields outside their home. But
they also immersed her in Native American culture and evangelical Christianity,
a contradictory baptism that owed to her father's missionary work. Together
they would visit the Mohawk nation, where he was known by his honorary
chief name (in English "enlightener"). Like his father before
him (and generations before, their relative and famed missionary David
Livingstone), Shelley's father worked in rural Tennessee as well, adding
to the musical influences Shelley was exposed to including gospel, soul
and African influences. They spent time together at revival meetings,
where her father's preaching, the worshippers' responses, and her own
performances exposed Shelley to a different kind of spirituality.
"I was there as The Child," she laughs. "I came to appreciate
the emotions I saw. But I've always been drawn to a more universal acceptance
of people instead of making them feel guilty. I'm not putting down anybody's
beliefs, but mine come more from wonder at the individual journey and
the ties that bind us all. And one of the ways that I learned to celebrate
this connectedness is through music." What she heard
was as strange as what she experienced in those days. In addition to
exposing Shelley to some unusual scenarios in her upbringing, her father
introduced her to music seldom heard on pop radio. "His record collection
was interesting, to say the least," she says. "He'd play The
Sounds of Algonquin Park -- birds and nature. Then he'd put on some
Native American drumming and chanting. Then he'd play something like
Johnny Cash. I heard bluegrass, gospel, hillbilly music and when we
weren't playing records or singing together, there was classical music
on the CBC." Eventually Shelley started doing gigs, at first
with one of her sisters in coffeehouses. Although she had been writing
verse throughout her teens it didn't occur to her to set it to music
until she was eighteen. But by that time she had already spent a year
in Virginia at perhaps the last school you might expect her to have
attended -- Liberty University, over which the Rev. Jerry Falwell presided.
"My dad being an evangelist, he had connections there," she explains,
"and I saw it as a chance to get out on my own. Of course, once I got
there I felt completely alienated. I looked like a gypsy/flapper, which
definitely made me not fit in. I found some kindred spirits who would
rather wear vintage clothes and shop in thrift stores than bleach their
hair blond and look like Miss America. And we found solace by hanging
out together as much as possible." Inevitably, Shelley followed
her muse away from the squeaky-clean campus and out onto the highway
in search of enlightenment. Armed with a tape recorder, a copy of On
the Road, and a guitar, she made her way through the heartland. "I
spent time with the homeless, interviewed people in the street -- and
what I found was that many of these people had a stronger sense of home
amongst themselves than the ones who felt that they had achieved the
American Dream. "Truckers were one example," she points out.
"They're a culture unto themselves. In truck stops I could hear the
engines outside, and inside the waitresses would connect with these
gruff-looking characters in a way that said, 'You're home right now.'
There was this combination of motion and stillness -- and for some reason
it felt like country music. I found it all inspiring."
Shelley's wanderings led her back to Ontario, where she began putting
what she'd seen to music and getting involved with experimental theater
and music circles. After a while, restless again, she left for the far
west to join her brother and a sister in Vancouver, where she started
busking in the streets, in a Django jazz style she had inherited through
gypsy traces in her mother's blood. Before long the routine lost its
allure; for the first time she felt as if her ship had beached and the
world's currents were rushing past without her. "So this one night
I lay on my bed, opened myself to the universe, and said, 'Take me to
the next level,'" she says. "And within a couple of days
I was performing in front of thousands of people at the Regina Folk
Festival " Fortune had led Allen Dobb to Shelley, whom he
invited to join his band Dobb and Dumela. Over the next several
years she would tour with them as they opened for Ziggy Marley, headlined
at the Smithers Midsummer Festival, and played to standing ovations
at the Winnipeg, Mariposa, Calgary, Bumbershoot, and other high-profile
events. "It was a great experience," she says, "but
it taught me that what I really wanted to do was to lead a band and
pursue my own music." And so in 1996 she made her way back
to Vancouver, whose vibrant artistic subculture inspired her to launch
the RANCH Society. Roots Allied Network Community Hosts, the organization
became an umbrella under which musicians could help each other find
work, write songs, get together for shows, and provide shelter for like-minded
performers passing through town. She also drew from RANCH's resource
to record her first CD, Misfit Café, which she released
under the name Auburn in 1999. Produced by Cecil English, whose
previous credits include D.O.A., Jello Biafra, and
nomeansno, the album exposed a harder-edged, sassier side to Campbell,
one that was consistent with the gritty romance of her material. In
November that same year Shelley began to record Blue Ridge Reveille,
this one produced by Jon Wood (Flophouse Jr.). She previewed
it with an EP, Is It You?, in 2001; someone in the RANCH family
burned copies one by one at home for local journalists and friends.
But when the complete album was released independently in 2002 the regional
media gave it immediate attention. The Vancouver Sun extolled her "achingly
beautiful ... lucid, worldly lyrics, sweet drawl, and fine performance."
Canada.com called it "a revelation ... straightforward and
joyful." To Georgia Straight it was "as quietly beautiful
as an untouched stand of Georgia pine." Ripples of interest
lapped in as well from abroad, as a reviewer for Americana-uk.com promised
that Blue Ridge Reveille "will be around for some time to come in
this household." Nettwerk took notice too. In fact, its version
of Blue Ridge Reveille improves on the indie release. In reviewing the
original CD for comeswithasmile.com, Tom Sheriff tempered his rave with
a complaint that the "sublime duet" version of "Is It You?" that Campbell
had recorded with Radiogram's Ken Beattie for the EP had been
omitted. Sheriff can rest easy now; this standout performance now takes
its place as the album's last track. So the pieces have fallen into
place, and Shelley seems to be ready for another adventure. Doubtless
she will be "discovered" by new audiences, surprise critics and win
fans in places she once visited as a pilgrim of sorts just a few years
ago. But no matter where the music takes her, she won't travel alone.
Her search for unity with the limitless world continues as before --
only the songs have changed, with new ones waiting to be born from communions
yet to come. "Drivin' You" appears on
the soundtrack to Showtime's "The L Word" as well on
the forthcoming bluegrass compilation "The Grass is Always
Bluer." "My music comes from the land," she
insists. "And it comes from the cities. All genres and all forms
have gone into it. I know people like to make comparisons, so I'll let
them decide for themselves how to hear what I do. All I can do is keep
it simple and let the music speak for itself." Blue Ridge
Reveille is sounding. Time to wake up.
For further information please contact Monica Seide at Nettwerk
America (310/855-0643 or via e-mail: Monica@Nettwerk.com).
"...voice
that tells a story all its own,
that has so much hard-earned history hiding behind,
and that ekes every last ounce of emotion from the prose."
- M. Bell, Calgary Sun
"...enchanting
and meticulously crafted..." -
Queue, Van. Sun
"****/5 stars"
- The Calgary Sun AND The Province
"Uniformly
strong, the album is loaded with that intangible quality
- call it honesty - that seperates pretenders..."
-M. Usinger, Georgia Straight