Julie Doiron, Woke Myself Up

You know Julie Doiron. I don’t mean you’ve heard her music before, mind you, either solo or from her time with Canadian indie-rock superstars Eric’s Trip. On her most recent full-length release, Julie sings like the best friend you haven’t heard from in years, catching you up on her life. Don’t expect cheerful, banal ten-year reunion banter, though. Doiron puts her listeners through the paces, grinning along to heartfelt tunes about family and love and barely stifling sobs on tales of missteps, loss, and regret. All this emotional honesty would be tiring in many other guises, but Doiron matches her candor with well-thought-out brevity. With most of the tracks clocking in at less than three minutes, the sweet tunes can’t turn saccharine, and the somber ones can’t sour the mood.

Many of the songs on the album act as their own interpreters, offering subtextual back-story to their very existence. The title track announces itself thusly: “I woke myself up / To rest my weary head / From all the work I’d done / In those dreams I had.” It’s as if Doiron is inviting us inside of her creative process, introducing the song and almost apologizing for it, passing it off as the midnight respite of a restless sleeper. The vocals here sound anything but sleepy. Doiron sheds her usual somber-whisper vocal style in favor of an upbeat, almost exuberant approach as she reveals the source of her sleeplessness — her daughter. “Almost each night / Between two and four / She rolls out of bed / And onto the floor / Sometimes I have to go in / And put her back into her bed, again,” Doiron chimes happily. You can actually hear the smile stretching the edges of her mouth and sense the fact that she is on the verge of tears just at the thought of scooping her still-sleeping child off of the floor at three in the morning. This sort of irrationally gleeful tenderness gets me all misty-eyed, as I have often done the same thing for my daughter, with similarly irrational enjoyment.

Musically, Woke Myself Up (both the album and the song, actually) heads in a slightly different direction than fans of Doiron’s solo work might be used to. Typically, Doiron’s arrangements are sparse, focusing on simple acoustic guitar patterns and hushed vocals. Not since her 2000 release with Canadian rockers The Wooden Stars has Julie released an album with full-band backing on the majority of the tracks. Here Doiron is in familiar company, being supported by former bandmates Rick White(bass, drums, guitar), Mark Gaudet(drums), and Chris Thompson(guitar) of Eric’s Trip. As evinced by the fact that the album is released as a Julie Doiron effort, the other band members are here as support, not as a focal point, and they do an excellent job. The structure allowed by an actual rhythm section lends weight to Julie’s sometimes flighty, meandering vocals, keeping them rooted in the song while still giving her the room to bend and shape the melodic line. Occasionally, the band is given permission to rock, most notably on “Don’t Wannabe/Liked by You,” a fuzzed-out rocker reminiscent of the sloppy, loose-legged rock of early Violent Femmes.

Some of the most charming moments on Woke Myself Up pop up when Doiron harmonizes with her self. There’s a wonderfully ramshackle element to the way she fuses her voice to itself. Doiron is not overly concerned with timing with her multi-tracked harmonies, allowing them to chase each other around the time signature and up and down scales. This ghost harmony is most effectively, and hauntingly, used on the bass-heavy, head-nodding dance-folk of “No More” and the bad-dream, semi-psychedelic “The Wrong Guy.” The former pairs hip-hop sample-ready drumming with a nice pulsing bass line, and the latter finds Doiron singing in her more characteristic hushed style, accompanied by Doug Martsch-inflected guitar work. These tunes are poster children for the melancholic side of Doiron’s material. “No More” is especially affecting, serving as a funeral dirge for Doiron’s musical life.

The final cut on the album, untitled and included at the last minute, is likely the most stark song of the bunch, lyrically. It’s a song of loss, regret, and hopelessness. “What a foolish thing I’ve done,” sings Doiron, “To lose the only one / Who really knows me at all.” It’s a fitting capstone to the rest of the songs collected here, running over all of the themes discussed in the course of the prior 27 minutes. Doiron slurs her words slightly, here, giving the whole thing the feeling of a late night, drunken confession put on tape before sobriety and second thought could prevent it. After this track, one would not be surprised to find Doiron silently fading from sight, with the lines echoing in your head: “And all those songs that I sung / Well now I know they were wrong / And now I’m taking ’em all back.”