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Several years ago, Lynn Miles visited a friend who was incarcerated in
a prison in Spain. The jail was an unpleasant one, she recalls, and her
friend had been inside it for two years. Miles asked him what he and the
other inmates talked about most. "His answer," Miles remembers, "was 'If
somebody loves us. That's the thing that matters to us most; if there's
someone outside who loves us and is thinking about us.'"
The same topic struck the Ottawa singer-songwriter after 9/11, particularly
"all the people who were on the planes with their cell phones, phoning
the people they loved." Because, Miles notes, "that's the most important
thing."
Those two polar stories - one, a solitary man in a Spanish prison whose
story had little impact on the world, and the other the greatest event
of the last half-century - combined to inspire *Love Sweet Love*, the
title track of Miles's latest album, a collection of 11 songs that explore
the relationships between love, joy, longing, loss, despair, emptiness,
reconciliation and redemption.
*Love Sweet Love*, Miles's fifth album and the follow-up to her 2003 Juno
Award-winning *Unravel*, is at once intensely introspective and universal,
with Miles combining her sweet, melodic and powerful voice with incisive
lyrics. Fans will instantly recognize her familiar, almost comforting,
darkness in *Love Sweet Love*, but may be surprised by the record's overall
upbeat musical tone, as if the music is the light she shines into the
shadowy depth of her - and ultimately our - soul. "I don't think you can
have one without the other," she says, both of the album's simultaneous
bright/dark coloring, and of life in general.
*Love Sweet Love* again finds Miles teaming up with *Unravel* producer
and guitarist Ian Lefeuvre and drummer Peter Von Althen, both of Starling,
and Chelsea Bridge double-bassist John Geggie to create a record of complex,
visceral material. Rounding out the sound are Prairie Oyster guitarist
Keith Glass and violinist James Stephens.
Born outside Montreal, Miles grew up in a musical home. Her father's jazz
collection was augmented by her mother's love of both opera and country
music. Her mother recalled once that she knew when her infant daughter
had finally fallen asleep in her crib: Lynn stopped singing. Miles learned
guitar, violin and flute at school, then switched to piano, and was writing
her own songs by the age of 10, many of them inspired by the books she
loved to read, and the music she listened to on the radio.
Miles's link between music and literature remains to this day. *Love Sweet
Love*'s opening track, *Flames of Love,* for example, was the result of
a long period of reading Sufi poetry. "I love the way the Sufis write
about love," Miles says. "Their love is a spiritual love, and I reinterpreted
it and wrote *Flames of Love*, about jumping in the fire and letting go
and not being afraid, and letting it get hot and not caring about what
other people think. Just really going for it." The idea - and the song
itself - is exhilarating and exciting, yet full of hidden corners and
alleyways from where the joy can be blind sided without notice. But as
Miles notes, "You don't learn from happiness."
If that's true, one gets the sense that Miles has learned a lot. In a
career that has seen her move from Ottawa to Nashville to Los Angeles
and back to Ottawa, and release albums as varied as the slick *Night in
a Strange Town* (co-produced by Larry Klein, of Shawn Colvin and Joni
Mitchell fame, and featuring renowned west-coast studio musicians David
Piltch, Dean Parks, John Cody and Tal Bergman) and the stark *Unravel*,
Miles has consistently been unflinching in putting it all out there: the
unreined ecstacy of new-found love, the fragile process of sweeping up
the pieces when it breaks.
The accolades, meanwhile, continue to pour in. Her 1996 album, *Slightly
Haunted*, was a *Billboard* magazine Top 10 pick for the year, while *Unravel*
was praised by *All Music Guide*, which described it as "sounding as if
it's been produced by Daniel Lanois in an Appalichian town" and "a diamond
in the rough." Canadian folk-music icon Valdy once said, "I'm sorry for
all the heartache she has to go through in order to get those juices going,
but, yeah, she's marvelous." *The New York Times* summed up her music
best when it wrote, "Lynn Miles makes being forlorn sound like a state
of grace."
*Love Sweet Love* is a road album. Songs such as *Night Drive*, which
Miles describes as being about "driving around in my Volkswagen for 12
years, and wanting to go home or wanting someone to be in the seat beside
me to tell me that everything's going to be OK," and *8 Hour Drive* perfectly
capture the lonely miles on a two-lane black-top. Others, like *Sweet
and Tender Heart*, about accepting your heart wherever it takes you, and
*Never Coming Back*, about coming to terms with mistakes made in a relationship,
are very much road songs on the map of the human heart.
"I like the light in *Love Sweet Love*," says Miles. "I like the rhythms
of the songs, and I like the journey you go on in this record. There are
lots of hills and valleys on it. *Unravel* was like driving across the
desert. This one is like driving down a real twisty, turny road. It's
like a journey, like a trip in the car."
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