Bringing it all back home

Sarah Harmer’s latest album, All Of Our Names, positively oozes with rustic charm and domestic intimacy. No surprises then to discover that the Canadian singer songwriter, who first came to prominence here when she toured with Josh Ritter, recorded it at her home in Quaker Valley, Ontario, her laundry cupboard doubling as the vocal booth while her living room served as the band room.

“It was a great way to work,” she says. “I’d recommend it to anyone. Lots of friends came along to play on it and they ended up staying over for a while. We had a great time making it.”
The signs are on it. Well crafted, lyrically observant and melodically infectious songs like ‘Pendulums’, ‘Dandelions In Bullet Holes’ and ‘Go To Sleep’ have the kind of relaxed downhome quality that could only have been created in such an environment.
Blending country, folk and rock influences in almost equal measure, Harmer’s effortless vocals and the band’s low-key backdrop make All Of Our Names one of the most delightful albums to come our way recently.
The youngest of a family of six, Harmer grew up on a 100-acre farm in Hamilton, Ontario.
“It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed my childhood there,” she says. “Up until the time I could drive, I did lots of hanging out around the farm and in the barn with my dog. Sometimes I wished I could have walked on the sidewalk in the town like other kids. But it was only about an hour’s drive from Toronto and we could see the city skyline in the distance, so it wasn’t totally isolated.”
Her family was a musical one and Harmer started playing guitar in the last year of school.
“I have four older sisters – two of them were really into Neil Young and we had a songbook of his. I learned ‘After The Goldrush’ for a Remembrance Day ceremony – it’s still one of my favourite albums of all time. When I was old enough to hang out in record stores I was into buying albums like REM’s Murmur and The Replacements’ Let It Be. I was a huge Replacements fan. Actually, I still am and I liked bands like The Bodines and Guadalcanal Diary, a lot of jangly, sensitive, college-rock guy stuff.”
At 17 Sarah joined a local country rock band called the Saddle Tramps before going on to University in Kingston, Ontario.
“It was a great time,” she remembers. “A lot of original music was coming up and there was a glorious period from the late 1980s to the early 1990s where there were opportunities to record on the cheap, and radio was interested in playing new music. When I moved to Kingston in ’94 I started another band called Weeping Tile. We made three albums and we still get together every year for a Salvation Army benefit show in Kingston.”
Canada’s relative isolation is, she believes, an advantage when it comes to making music.
“You’re always more of an observer. It seemed like another world to us up there. Even though we were doing our own thing our world didn’t seem to exist in glossy magazines like it did in other places. When I did the David Letterman Show a couple of years ago it was like walking straight into that world for me. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m playing this show’, which I used to think was not in my realm of experience. It took me a long while to realise that everyone is in the same world together.”

All Of Our Names is out now on Zoe Records (through RMG)