As I sat with singer/songwriter Sarah Slean in the dining room of a Vancouver hotel, it was difficult to imagine that less than twenty-four hours before, I had witnessed this now quiet, and slender woman cavorting about the stage, while she performed her first of two concerts in this west coast city. Now she appears reflective and delicate, almost like a porcelain doll, but during her performance, she rocked out on the piano at moments, while at other times she kibitzed with her fans while singing in cabaret style.

The spring release of her CD The Baroness marked the fifth major release for the singer / songwriter, and she continues to build on the legacy of her three 2007 recordings, Night Bugs, her self-titled Sarah Slean (EP) and Orphan Music. In 2004, she released the album Day One, which was followed by a lengthy European tour, which provided the impetus behind turning her into a bona fide international music star.

Slean’s all out assault on the European music market was launched from her home away from home, in Paris, France, “I was there for seven months. I went there to uproot myself again. It is a M.O. that I have held for myself for a while. As soon as I feel stuck artistically, I need to take away everything that I know and throw myself into danger. I go back to ignorance and the unknown. That’s when I have a childlike mind again, when everything is miraculous and frightening. That was my main reason for going to Paris. I also went there, because of my love for the French culture. I think that the reason I lasted there for so long, is because I was having a dark season, and there was some heavy learning at hand. I knew that I had to see it through its course. At first it was a very superficial dream of, I want to go to Paris, I want to go to Paris, but it became more than that. It became one of the major steps in my life, and one of the major learning experiences,” she says.

Paris was not like going to a beach and being instantly revitalized, producing an entirely new Sarah Slean. It was far from it. “When I got there (Paris) the apartment that I had arranged to rent, was no longer available. I had all of my existence in a suitcase, and this was after spending the past two and one half years on the road, so I was very weary, and I needed a place to lay my head. I was thrown into the wind again. I was literally dragging a suitcase all over Paris, while searching for an apartment. I was meeting strange people,” she says.

“If you are listening to life it will show you these beautiful synchronicities and these beautiful symbols which can be really helpful for guiding you. I got many of those and so fast, that I was convinced that I was there for a reason. (I was convinced) that something big was going to happen to me, spiritually or whatever it was,” Slean says reflectively.

While she was living in Paris, Sarah Slean was immersed in a culture, where she did not speak the language, had no communication with her family and friends, nor did she have contact with anything that was familiar to her. “It was like I had taken every coat of identity off. I was no longer a musician. I was no longer charming or smart linguistically, because I couldn’t communicate with people. I was a female stranger in my late twenties. I wasn’t anything to anyone. It shakes you up and forces you to confront (the question), ‘Who am I?’ If I don’t have any of these tags or labels on, then who am I? Do I like myself? That was tough, but it had to be done. It was a very important phase (of my life). I actually felt that the city was hostile towards me,” she recalls.

May 2008