In a time when the narratives of the heart are becoming increasingly diluted, Taryn Laronge brings back to the table that spirited muse that is a songwriters calling, an internal grappling with the pain of the past and the myriad of ways in which that pain moves us forward. Honesty and self examination are at the forefront of Laronge's compositions, which sit comfortably in that rich tradition of confessional female songwriters that have helped to define, in this writers mind, what music can do almost better than any other language, repair, heal, and bind people together in ways that are hard to put your finger on. But the pulse is there. Taryn sings it the way she's lived it, you can hear it in her voice, how the story and the telling of it are embodiments both of dark and of light, one making room for the other. A songwriter must go deep against the odds that what they come out with may or may not be what they expected to find. In this sense it is all about the journey. Laronge is a traveler who, having taken those odds, leaves us with songs that are both compass and path. Their heart is big, their soul is strong, their love is pronounced and their hunger for more life is the high note that lingers long after the last note of Little Doorways is played. The album, after all, ends with Dear Life, in more ways than one. AHC: What have been your biggest heartaches and your biggest hopes and successes when it comes to the music, the struggles and the triumphs of making sounds with your heart in a world that increasingly devalues what the heart makes? Taryn: It’s true that the world, these days, seems to increasingly devalue everything that the heart makes. So it’s true in that respect that things like music and art seem to have lost a lot of their intrinsic value in that world. But I like to keep my world small and live in my own tiny bubble and that creates a world whereby I can maintain a tremendously high value and esteem for all art, and especially music. Here in my own little corner music holds the most value above anything else, in fact. It hasn’t always been easy to stay in this world for me however and I am noticing more and more that the more experience I have in life and the more I learn, the more protective I am capable of being of this world. AHC: What first drew you to music and what was your early musical environment like growing up? Were there pivotal songs for you then that just floored you the moment you heard them? Taryn: I was first drawn to music because my family home had a real piano. I say real piano because people nowadays seem to always be getting rid of their ‘real’ wooden pianos. Anyway, the piano that we had was a brand new Yamaha upright apartment sized model that my father bought two years before I was born. It had a lovely sound and I remember spending lots of time on that piano when I was five years old. I used to sit on the bench with my little legs dangling and fool around on the black keys. I used to pretend that I was composing a piece of music for a ballet and I would start playing and tell myself that every note must be beautiful OK and full of love and acceptance until the piece was done and I would even create a little ending for it. Like I was already a big composer at the age of five, LOL. It’s kind of funny thinking back on that, but I’m actually nowadays getting more and more interested in composing music for film and TV whether that be songs or acoustic pieces so it’s not a huge surprise to me actually. Aside from this piano, which my dad would also play on for hours, my home had a record player and I remember being obsessed with listening to records on it. Ah records, they sound so amazing, don’t they? I miss records so much. I recently listened to Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” album on my friend’s record player and I have never heard a more beautifully recorded sound. So, songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and Peter Paul and Mary’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” were songs that meant a huge amount of inspiration to me. They were songs that my parents both loved and yet they somehow especially over time became songs that really inspired me to want to write music and sing and their inspiration seems to only get stronger and stronger the more time passes. What I mean by that is that I have especially grown to love this era of songwriting that my parents were both fond of more and more over the years. AHC: What do you think makes for a good song, as you're writing and composing, is there a sudden moment when you know you've found the right mix, that perfect angle of light, so to speak? Taryn: This is a great question. When I’m writing I like to sit down at the piano usually, but every now and then I’ll pick up the guitar. At first I like to find a series of chords that my heart resonates with. I won’t start singing any words or humming until I have a strong connection to them and I know for certain that I really LOVE them and am committed to using them. So once I lock into what chords I am using, then the words and the themes will just start to come. And slowly but surely as I keep playing around with these chords and looping them, soon enough either a little chunk of a verse or a snippet of a chorus will start to emerge. From there it’s pretty easy I just write whichever piece of the song is still missing. At this point I ask myself the question “Have I said everything I need to say in the song?” and if the answer is yes then I am done and if the answer is no then I write a bridge. When I write a bridge I tend to usually use music theory more at that point and I look at which chords I haven’t already used in the song. But you know sometimes the best bridges don’t even need any knew chords at all and I just repeat some of the chords that have already been using in the song. It just depends. You have to trust yourself and your ear. Trust too that your heart will make the right decision for the song. AHC: Do you consider music to be a type of healing art, a slightly imperfect vehicle through which to translate states of rupture/rapture, hope lost and regained? Does the writing and creating of the song save you in the kinds of ways that it saves us, the listener? Taryn: This is a very interesting topic. I have definitely had experience with many facets of this question. What I mean by this is that I have spent some periods of my life writing songs about the traumas in my life and those songs come out with one particular style. Whereas I have also written songs about completely imagined traumas, where, just like an actor I imagine a certain trauma happening to me and I live that out inside of the song and this type of song writing has a completely unique type of style. I have written songs with other people and I find that those songs have yet another particular style. I have written songs where I have written the lyrics first like a poem and then I put those words to music and these songs have yet another style or emotional resonance. I think the tricky part is determining which ones end up communicating a message that houses a truly genuine emotional resonance with people and this is where the true healing can be delivered both to the writer and to the listening public. Anything that is capable of manifesting a genuinely honest emotional response is a very powerful thing especially in light of a world around us that nowadays seems to have a lot of plasticity and not a lot of fearless honesty. As humans beings we are forever looking for these types of honest and genuine emotions to connection to because they remind us who we really are. We are light and love beings living in a world that wants us to think otherwise. So when you write a song that doesn’t do that even if it sounds nice it’s not going to be as healing to the performer or the audience. Over the years I have started to feel the impact of my own songs on my soul and I have learned to become extremely mindful of which songs I record and what their impact on me and my own healing is going to be. I don’t want to remain naïve, I want to expand further and further towards my soul’s complete and utter emancipation through music. And I want that for other people too. AHC: Which musicians have you learned the most from? Or writers, artists, filmmakers, teachers/mentors etc.? What are the works you could not possibly live without, the ones that have helped to pull you above water? Taryn: There’s a small group of musicians who are in my life currently whom I could not survive without. They each came into my life by way of some other musician friend of mine like a sort of musician-to-musician referral. They have become my muses in one-way or another. One of them is more like a mentor to me, who I can ask music theory questions to, one of them is more of an inspiration to me, I love his voice and guitar playing and without his style of guitar playing my music wouldn’t be the same; and one of them is more like a mirror to me, reminding me not to give up when I am going through a hard time, helping me get become a better performer and with my microphone technique, etc. Combined, I have mentorship, resonance and inspiration, and compassion and reflection; all things that every musician needs to have I believe to really thrive. So it’s really important to have a family of musicians surrounding you in order to remain as strong as possible as an artist, I believe. I also think it helps you believe in yourself when you are not just surrounded by any producer or musicians but rather by ones for whom you hold the highest regards for. It took me a long-long time to meet musicians like these ones but now that I have found them I want to hold on to them and honor them the best that I can because I recognize that they are the ingredients that help make me the best artist I can be. I think at the end of the day that we are all on different musical paths but that we are all writing music to discover who we are as humans and become better ones and share our respective versions of messages of peace and love with the world. I have started to play shows with these people and have never felt more like myself then any other moment in my life. They all get along too and sitting with them after a show and having a beer with these wonderful human beings has got to be one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. I could not possibly live without all of Joni Mitchell’s albums, the Beatles, Jimmy Page’s guitar playing style and songwriting, The Rolling Stones, Eddie Vedder, Neil Young, ABBA, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Tori Amos, Janice Joplin, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan. There are definitely more writers and singers that I also love and who have influenced me and my writing but these are definitely some of my top influencers who I couldn’t live without. AHC: What are your fondest musical memories? In your house? In your neighborhood or town? On-tour, on-the-road? Taryn: In my house it was definitely listening to my first Joni Mitchell records or to the Beatles and ABBA records and also to my father playing on our piano. In my neighborhood it was listening to the radio and to other female singers at my girl friend’s houses while we hung out as teenagers or going to see my first Tori Amos concert with my best friends when I was a teenager. I have yet to tour this is something that I am really looking forward to doing over the next several years so I will have to get back to you about that! AHC: When you set out to write a song, how much does 'where the world is' in its current moment, culturally, politically, otherwise, influence the kinds of stories you set out to tell? Taryn: Some times it matters a lot and other times I completely ignore what’s going on in the world at that moment. For example last year I wrote a song at a music workshop I attended that was put on my a number of large music societies in the city where I currently live, namely SOCAN and CREATIVE BC and we decided to take our inspiration for the song from the popular Netflix series “13” and we wrote a song about teenage suicide. It’s called “Crying Wolf” and it’s one of my current favorites. I have yet to record it but I would like to do that soon and I am currently singing it at my live shows. People seem to be responding to it really well, too. Alternatively, I have completely imagined a world where one character has something happen to them which is coming completely from my imagination. So I definitely use the real world and the imagined world, just depends. AHC: What's the best piece of advice you've received, life advice, music advice? And what advice would you offer to others who are just starting out on their creative roads and trying to find their voice and their way in this world? What are the kinds of things that you tell yourself when you begin to have doubts or are struggling with the creative process? Taryn: I have a very clear answer to this question, which has just been brought into my world by one of my good friends who is an actor and fellow songwriter. He recently has been helping me grow a lot and both of us are doing a type of new therapy called ‘e-code’, which has been doing wonders to our brains re-wiring and anyways he told me this quote from the legendary poet Rumi the other day that really resonates with me and would be something I would want to pass on to any artists out there who may be struggling. The quote goes like this: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Where the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.” - Rumi I think the quote does an amazing job of reminding us who we really are and all of our troubles in life seem to come about when we forget this. AHC: Your album, Little Doorways, is a thoughtful and beautiful canvas of life and its many struggles. The songs, in many ways, feel like a letter to inner self-hood, and a reminder that closed doors also open, as you sing; "I forgot life is not a closing stage, it's about surfacing." I imagine the creation of this album has helped you to surface in many ways. Could you talk us through your process with these songs and the stories that live, breathe and thread their way through this work? Taryn: Sure. For starters I just want to say that you are correct in saying that you imagine the creation of this album helped me to surface in many ways, this is completely true, and yet it’s equally true that the real ‘surfacing’ started to occur the most when I began to perform these songs live which in my case didn’t begin until after I’d recorded and released the album. If I had to do it all over again and I will LOL (I’m currently working on my second album) I would play the songs live (which I am doing) first and then record them so that I know how they are going to effect me if I sing them on an ongoing basis. Anyways these songs were written over a couple year time-span and they are all mostly about all of the darkness and traumas that I’ve endured in my life. I wrote a lot of the songs about an abusive relationship I was in with a narcissist. Anyone who has ever spent time or lived with a narcissist will tell you that you can never feel love or do anything right in the eyes of someone who is narcissistic. It’s a terrible environment for an artist because an artist needs to be seen and a narcissist will never ever be capable of seeing anyone other than himself or herself. Anyways it was a super destructive environment for me, and one in which I sacrificed myself as an artist and I didn’t do a lot of music during this period, either. Perhaps I wanted to escape being an artist for a while I am not sure but when the relationship was over I wrote my debut album “Little Doorways” as a way of responding to this period in my life where I ignored who I was and allowed myself to live for somebody else. In a way this album represents a period in my life that I never ever want to repeat. It’s like a tattoo and reminds me, who I could become if I am not mindful and how precarious it is for me to not value myself enough as an artist if I am not careful. Since writing this album I have written many other songs and I have been on a mission to develop myself into the strongest artist I can be given that I am living inside of a world who seems to have forgotten the tremendous value of art. But I am happily committed to reminding the world every day and with each song I write why music is so important to human beings because it can literally heal them. For the very latest visit Taryn's Website and the social media platforms below: Youtube, Soundcloud, Twitter, Facebook Comments are closed.
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December 2023
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