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Music

Dorothea Paas is Ahead of Her Time

The 22 year old Toronto artist creates music that's basic, in the most beautiful way possible.

There’s an instant allure to 22-year-old Dorothea Paas’ grungier recordings that is a little elusive until you look through the lyrics. Songs that instantly sound like they could’ve fit perfectly on The Basketball Diaries’ soundtrack take a right turn when you realize that they’re actually about eye-rollingly mundane activities - like riding a bike or a wearing someone’s second hand sweater – yet, the attraction is that they’re sung and delivered with the same fickle conviction of a user trying to exploit their self-induced plight. On "Same Sun" she sings “riding a bike around town, made out of pieces I had found. I didn’t wonder where they came from but I wondered where they’d been.”

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Maybe it has to do with her degree in English and love of Henry James, but Paas needs no such plight, resorting to her tasteful lyrical delivery to sell the songs. But it’s not just words with Dorothea. Carrying the songs in their seemingly meandering and tilted way are deceptively sturdy arrangements, melodies and chord changes. Add to that the gritty instrumentation, and it's pretty awesome, like how you’d imagine it would sound if Joni Mitchell was the lead singer of the Posies, or something.

Originally a singer-songwriter from Toronto, Paas went to Queen’s university in Kingston in 2010 with the intention of recording and playing music live. Her first EP, Songs, which was just her experimenting with recording solo guitar tunes, soon attracted the attention of Kingston’s grungier artists, who encouraged her to develop the songs.

“When people first approached me I was thinking ‘great now I’ve gone and embarrassed myself’,” she admits. But, being musically curious herself, in addition to having recently seen Julie Doiron live in 2011 “playing singer songs in a two piece electric set that transferred amazingly,” Paas went for it, resulting in the collective effort that is her brilliant 2013 EP (almost LP, 8 songs) titled A Thirst.

Recorded and released on tape, with the assistance of more seasoned recorders and friends, A Thirst is a brilliant EP, certainly on par quality wise with other great 2013 off the radar records, like Jackson Scott’s Melbourne in 2013 that launched his career last year. The effect of the added grittier instrumentation, whilst potentially formulaic on paper, is unexpectedly and surprisingly unique.

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It makes the songs meander and spiral, start and stop, grit then sigh, instilling her originally introverted nylon guitar songs a gaveling sense of authority. It sounds like what you’d imagine the kids of PJ Harvey and Beat Happening might produce. But like her lyrics, Dorothea keeps her influences very grounded.

“I’m certainly influenced by ppl like Joni Mitchell or Julie Doiron, or even Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis, whose vocal delivery is awesome. But really, I’m mostly influenced by the things and musicians and people directly around me,” she says. “I like things to be here and now and kind of basic, when they get too abstract or idealized it becomes fake. It’s much more appropriate for me to be influenced by something in front of me.

But Paas explains the freewheeling and effortless feel of her work is no accident, and that often, she will record herself improvising singing words for the first time, and then teach herself to memorize the improvisation “so it always has that feeling branded into it." A series of successful rocking live shows and brief tours later, and Paas had developed a small niche for herself. Later in the year, Paas and comrades put out another 3 song single, Strange Times / Just The Same / The Drought, which like A Thirst, takes the approach a step further, resulting in simpler lyrics floating through even more meandering and ephemeral songs.

With almost derisory lyrics like “I go to her, my friend she understand me, I talk to her on phone, we take turns listening” Dorothea explained: “I didn’t want to romanticize anything, I wanted to just sing about what I know. But then I realized I don’t really ‘know’ anything, except basic stuff like this, so I had to start there.”

There’s a poetic intelligence behind Dorothea’s work, which, when combined with her vocal execution, manages to pull these lyrics out of suburban kindergarten and deposit them in some isolated hostel in an unknown town. Having recently moved to Toronto, Dorothea is currently working on another batch of “more intricate and experimental” songs that she says may be released later this year.

Steven Viney is a writer living in Montreal. He is on Twitter - @helloximage