Slean’s lyrics paint stunningly beautiful word pictures and they are set against sophisticated compositions, which often boast full string sections, as does the song, “Willow.” Many, if not all of her songs, are deeply personal, as is the case with, “Get Home,” the second track from The Baroness.  It is a song about discovering the difference between real love and simply living a fantasy.

“Get Home,” is pretty reflective of my personal experience. A lot of these songs are (personal). There’s no twisting of the truth, fiction or decoration. They are very simple and true narratives. That (song) is about a situation that has happened in my life several times. I started to think that perhaps it was me and not them, that it was something that I was doing, which was attracting that theme to my life over and over again,” Slean says.

“I didn’t want to be that person who was going to complain in music. I wanted to write “Get Home,” encapsulate what I was feeling, purge the demons, and then wipe it all away. After I wrote that song, I knew that it (those types of relationships) would never happen again.”

Slean admits that in the past, she found herself cast both in the role of the one living a masquerade, and also finding that she was involved with another, whose love was no more than a lie. Those relationship struggles, pain and heartbreak gave birth to “Please Be Good To Me,” and “Looking For Someone,” both recorded on The Baroness.

“My relationships have been dramatic and eventful, as it can be when one is searching and filled with this longing. I had really terrible relationships, with people cheating on me, and with me cheating on other people. It was like a soap opera, and I got to the point when I was writing this record when I (realized) that the only person who can end this is me. It’s you who makes the decision to end it. It’s not like circumstances are governing your life. You are creating the circumstances. We always feel that we are imposed on by reality, but I think we make our reality. I really do. That dawned on me in my twenty-ninth year, and very much so when I woke up and I was thirty. I was like, ‘I don’t want that anymore, I don’t want that anymore.’ It’s about having that thought and saying it out loud. I am starting to write about that. It was like a magic wand. (That part of my life) went away and good relationships came to me. A measure of peace came to me that I had never experienced before,” says Slean.

Another song from The Baroness, “So Many Miles,” could well be Slean’s biography set to a jagged rock melody.  The song chronicles both her life and self-discovery while living in Paris. It talks about new beginnings, without sacrificing the essence of the person that she is. It is also a song that possesses a contagious melody, and it invites the listener to make it their own personal anthem.

Despite her stage persona as The Baroness, an alter ego which Slean describes as goofy, she is a tremendously resilient individual, evidenced by her recovery from the 2003 fire in Toronto, where literally everything she owned went up in smoke. Following that tragedy, she went to live in a cabin in a forest.

“I went to this cabin, not sure if I was going to come back. When I say that in interviews, it sounds like I made these really smart decisions, but I don’t think that I did. I think that it was a desperate move to just cut everything off. For some reason, I was full of hatred at that moment in my life. I hated every member of my family. If I had been sitting here, I would have hated everything. I would have hated you, this place and the news on the TV. I hated art. I hated the fact that I was a musician for a living. I thought that it was pathetic. I was just so full of hate, that it was killing me. I was ill all of the time. I had lost twenty-five pounds from where I am now,” she says, as I consider the frightening prospect of how little she must have weighed.

Continuing to recall her cabin experience, she says, “I went there and I felt like the universe pulled me there. I didn’t go, ‘Damn it I am going to live in the forest.’ I was compelled to go there, because something needed to happen. I spent time in the cabin, totally lost, not knowing where I was going to go, or what I was going to do there. Being totally lost was like being an island in the middle of a stormy sea. I don’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t speak for two weeks on end. I would go to use my voice and it would crack, because I hadn’t spoken to anybody for two weeks.  I was just wafting through the day, not knowing what to do. Something happened when I let myself be there, and it was so amazing. I noticed after that period of total nothingness, that I was able to play my piano and to do my painting. I was like, ‘How could I refuse that?’ How could I hate that in myself?  It is so natural. It is like the leaves coming out on the trees in the spring. It’s like the chipmunks chippering around in the forest. It’s like I forgave myself or something.” 

May 2008