photo credit - Phillip Walker The Record staff photographer. |
Ferron weaves wisdom throughout poetic performance
May 01, 2009
BY ROBERT REID
WEB EDITION
RECORD STAFF
WATERLOO -- It was eerily familiar when Ferron was forced to cancel her concert in January at the Princess Cinema. A year previously Willie P. Bennett, another revered Canadian singer/songwriter of about the same age, died of a heart attack days before a scheduled concert at the Princess.
Happily, Ferron looked fit as the proverbial fiddle last night when she honoured her postponed concert after convalescing from surgery to repair a collapsed artery.
The 57-year-old songwriting icon also demonstrated that less can be more with regards to a live performance.
She played a mere 10 songs and recited four original poems over 90 uninterrupted minutes.
Although she received a rousing standing ovation amid cheers and whistles, she declined to return for an encore.
Still, one did not leave the theatre feeling cheated or shortchanged. The reason was two-fold -- Ferron the artist and Ferron the person.
Few musicians are held in such high esteem, verging on adoration.
She has written some of the best of the very best songs ever written in the contemporary, introspective singer/writer tradition.
Her songs express life as an emotional, psychological and spiritual journey. They begin in pain and suffering, pass through the threshold of acceptance and forgiveness and enter the garden of redemption and salvation.
Women -- and many men -- identify with her songs because they see in poetic images and transporting melodies their own lives commemorated in songs that embrace tender hearts and comfort bruised souls.
She performed many of the songs she re-recorded with startling effect on her 14th album Boulder.
She offered -- and they were offerings -- Souvenir, Never Your Own, Girl on a Road, The Cart, Shady Gate, Snowin' in Brooklyn and Cactus, among others, with a casual grace that surrendered nothing to the occasional blurry chord.
Her voice was a warm, richly textured instrument that retained traces of vocal ornamentation.
But Ferron never comes just to sing songs.
She engaged audience members in an informal conversation that was at once witty, funny, insightful and poignant.
She spoke of, and advocated for, decency, care, integrity and love.
She beseeched people to "make something beautiful every day, " adding by way of example that she bakes bread, quilts, gardens, takes care of chickens and makes music.
Ferron has the critical capacities of a wry standup comic.
"How can you drive on King Street going east and west and north and south without turning a corner?" she asked.
She talked about growing tomatoes, wall-mounted, TVs, remote viewing, itunes and American intervention in Afghanistan to protect poppy production.
"Life is not as long as we thought," she ruminated. "It's shocking."
Ferron is quick to laugh, especially at herself.
After struggling with a song she has seldom played in 25 years, she concluded, "maybe I won't be doing this request thing.
"Are there any psychics in the room?" she asked at one point.
You didn't need extrasensory powers to perceive the presence of an artist of the highest order -- one who reveals ourselves to ourselves through the marriage of language and sound in the service of living.