Listen to Devon Sproule

Posted by Sarah Larson

At the end of 2009, a friend of mine who lives in the Bay Area mailed a mix of his favorite songs of the year to a bunch of people—a muso’s gesture of holiday good will. While listening to it for the first time, I heard a song that made me turn around and stare at the computer, as if it could explain to me what I was hearing. Who was this? It wasn’t a revolutionary sound—it amazed me because it was great. An acoustic guitar, and then a young woman’s voice, warm, confident, gentle, singing, “It’s good to get out of the house.” There was no barrier between it and me—I loved it immediately. She repeated “It’s good to get out of the house,” stretching the “good” into a lovely melody, and went on,

Ooh, don’t it feel so good?
Just go and buy a motorcycle
And ride till the sun is over
Ooh, don’t it feel so good?

She draws out “ride,” too, the melody itself a little joyride. As the song proceeds, it gets both more urgent and more wise, creating and resolving tension without losing its easy, catchy feel; it has a singing-on-the-back-porch spirit but tight, disciplined production. It sounds like music made by musicians who might respect hippies but who are not hippies themselves: it has no self-congratulatory folksy affectations. It was called “Good to Get Out.” When it was over, I played it again. And again. I listened to more of my friend’s mix—all of it very good—and then it happened a second time: I turned around and stared at the computer. She was back.

I asked God for a good job
He put me on a plane
He put me on a plane
All of the people that I love
The people that I’m from
Are far yodel-oh-tee yodel-oh-way

This song, “Ain’t That the Way,” had an almost reggaeish beat, the same easy feel as “Good to Get Out,” but it was wryer, funnier, a little sexy. She sang about unpacking dirty clothes, sleeping in her coat, eating in the car, a neighbor baby in the mud playing in the sun. The song went in weird, wonderful directions: after the halfway point, after an anguished series of “Ain’t that the way”s, the song turned sweet and lovely, cozy in its loneliness. There was a xylophone that evoked a childhood music box, and the singer’s words repeated like a canon, or like a series of nights alone:

You’re on your own, you’re on the way home
New Ry Cooder on the radio
You’re cooking for one
Re-watching an old video
And here in the distance
Here in the miss-you
Fonder and fonder and fonder

This was my introduction to Devon Sproule. For the next few months, I listened her constantly—this album, “Don’t Hurry for Heaven!,” and the one that preceded it, “Keep Your Silver Shined.” No one I knew, except my friend in California, seemed to know who she was. I did some Googling; she seemed like a mystery I needed to get to the bottom of.

Sproule was born in 1982, in Kingston, Ontario, to parents who lived on a commune named Dandelion. They moved to Virginia, where she grew up in a commune called Twin Oaks, whose main source of income is from tofu-making and hammocks. Her parents are musicians. She played from a young age, performing for many years in nearby Charlottesville (which has, on and off, been her home since). She released her first album when she was sixteen and began touring nationally. She released “Long Sleeve Story,” her second album, in 2001, and her third, “Upstate Songs,” in 2003. In 2005, she married Paul Curreri, a RISD graduate and fellow-musician who had jumped onstage while she was performing in Charlottesville a few years earlier. Curreri, who is also talented and full of heart, has albums with names like “Songs for Devon Sproule” and “Are You Going to Paul Curreri” and “The Big Shitty.” His vibe is a bit rascally. There’s a video of them online in which they describe telling Sproule’s dad about their engagement. He wasn’t surprised, and said, as Curreri recalls it, “ ‘It’s kind of like when someone kills themselves, but you already knew they were depressed.’ ” They laugh about this.

“Keep Your Silver Shined,” which Sproule wrote during this period—the getting-married era—crackles with wisdom, love, and joy. It’s supremely confident; she has said that the power of that experience, of having someone you love want to spend his life with you, contributed to the songwriting. It also comes through in her singing. The album begins with “Old Virginia Block,” a rollicking reminiscence of home (“The gleam of your white underclothes, in the back seat, in the Blue Ridge / The pile of bacon by a couple fried eggs, kiss marks and hearts on a picnic table leg / The quartet fretting on up in my head, on my long walk, through the Blue Ridge”) that manages to be wistful and robust at the same time. The whole album brims with that kind of realist sentimentality—ten-cent yellow hat, rotten fruit kicked off a path, groundhog eating the lettuce right out of the ground, idly thinking about going to see a jazz band in town. Its styles range smoothly from jazz-standard (cello, clarinet) to bluegrass and folk (banjo, fiddle, harmonica) and beyond. Paramount are Sproule’s voice and a mood of homespun authority, happiness laced with a hint of pain, leavened with humor.

“Don’t Hurry for Heaven” came next: more love, more humor, more pain. In a a 2009 interview that NPR did with Sproule and Curreri, Curreri described the title song as “more of a command than a confession.” The song begins:

I don’t believe
That you should believe
In heaven anymore
The way that you’re goin’
I’m afraid of you floatin’ away

Later, she sings, “So if you love me even half as much as you love your old Martin / you should be practicing on me just about every…” The line trails off and ends with a beautiful bit of guitar noodlery. Her lyrics are often like this: you worry about this narrator a bit, and then you don’t—whoever she is, she can take care of herself.

I fell in love with this album, and I wanted to see Sproule in concert, but she was never around. She and Curreri toured overseas often. They have a big fan base in the U.K.: they appeared on “Later with Jools Holland” in 2007, and in 2010 Sproule released an album called “Live in London,” recorded at Queen Elizabeth Hall, complete with the sound of hundreds of cheering British people. They moved to Berlin in 2011, drawn by affordable housing and proximity to their fans. That year, Sproule released a single online, “Now’s the Time,” from a new album, “I Love You, Go Easy”:

New Haven
Could be our plan
To make you a happier man

San Diego
Could be the show
We can sing our last cynical note …
I could teach and support us both
Give clean living a real go

“I Love You, Go Easy” has pretty songs on it, and heart; it feels a bit quieter and sadder than the previous two, and lyrics from the perspective of someone who’s getting worn down, or trying not to. (“I’ve been a bit of a broken record, darling, as of late / Sometimes it’s you I’m picking on / Sometimes I think I’m saving your life / I’d like to think you’d do that for me.”) “Now’s the Time,” with its dream of clean living and honest work, is to me its most affecting song, and it sounds a bit like a pipe dream. Sproule and Curreri moved to Austin, Texas, in 2012, and they live there now.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Sproule’s mailing list: she had a new album, “Colours,” a collaboration with a musician named Mike O’Neill, and she was coming to town, playing late on a Sunday night. Sproule’s talent doesn’t always correspond to the size of the venues she plays. The night of the show, around 10 P.M., I got into a cab after a bustling celebration at BAM and raced to Pete’s Candy Store, that beloved caravan-like institution nestled beneath the B.Q.E. in Williamsburg. There was no cover charge; you just bought a drink and found a seat. An earnest ring of about thirty people sat at tables and in single chairs around the perimeter of the little room, enraptured. Sproule was onstage, singing and playing guitar with her eyes closed. She was thin. She wore a loose-knit vest and cargo shorts. She sounded wonderful. I crept to the lone empty seat, right in front of the stage; it happened to be at the table of a musician I knew, a happy coincidence. Sproule sang songs from “Colours,” accompanied by members of Bernice, a young Canadian band that plays on the album. Between songs, Sproule told a story about a kid named Frolic, whom they’d all seen while visiting Twin Oaks that morning, in Virginia. When she announced the last song, everybody cheered with love. The musician at my table called out, “Should we hand the bucket around?”

“Oh, sure, thanks,” Sproule said. A red tin bucket was passed from table to table and people threw singles into it.

“This song is called ‘You Can Come Home,’ ” Sproule said. It was the first song on “Colours,” which, when I’d listened to it on the CD, sounded like it was building toward something but also holding back. Hearing it live, watching her sing with her eyes closed, intent and in her own world, it sounded thrilling—both fully realized and like a promise of something to come.

After the show, Sproule and I sat down in the front room at Pete’s Candy Store. “I haven’t been here in so long,” she said, looking around the barroom. “It doesn’t feel like it’s in a huge hurry like some places.” She and the members of Bernice had travelled up from Virginia that day. “I’ve been working with them a lot, and so to bring them to Twin Oaks was really nice,” she said. “They know my songs really well. We swam in the pond, and they said, ‘Is it true that if you jump off the dock in a certain part of the pond you have to hang on to your bits?’ And I said, ‘No, no! I’m sure there are no snakes or turtles or whatever.’ And then a snake swam by.”

She likes working with Bernice. “What they do all day is sing to each other and make up songs, like freestyle,” she said. “Not performing, just being musical. I’m not much of an improviser, but then when I’m around them all of a sudden I can make a freestyle. They’ve been really influential on my last two records. They’re sort of like jazz-trained but R. & B.-obsessed, really open-eared people—very musically playful and experimental but groove-based.” She sipped a gin and tonic.

“Colours” grew out of another kind of improvisation, she said. “I did this thing called Low-Key Karaoke, where I would video myself singing the harmony parts to a famous song”— “In My Room,” “If I Fell,” “Crying in the Rain”—“and people would submit themselves singing the melody, and I would splice them together and make them into duets. Mike’s were the best I ever got. And we started corresponding.”

They wrote the album remotely; O’Neill lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Sproule and Curreri were doing a residency on Fisher’s Island. “I think the Toronto scene has made my music a little weirder, and collaborating with Mike on all these songs has made it a little catchier, too,” Sproule said. “I really hope that I’m right about that: weirder and catchier.”

I asked her about Curreri, and about lyrics like “Don’t hurry for Heaven.” Was everything all right? “Yeah. What you’re pickin’ up on is ‘Don’t drink so much,’ ” Sproule said. “Paul stopped drinking a year ago, and it’s been amazing. For me, anyway. He misses it. But he’s a lot more positive.” She showed me some pictures of Curreri with their dog, Tim, an insanely cute fuzz ball; man and dog were at home, in Texas. The members of Bernice were getting ready to head out. “Time to hitch a ride to Boston,” Sproule said, and off they went, into the night.

Photograph by Philip Ryalls/Redferns via Getty.

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000205 EndHTML:0000021340 StartFragment:0000021300 EndFragment:0000021300 SourceURL:file:///C:\Users\Francisco%20Brasil\Documents\Borowitz%20Report%20The%20New%20Yorker.doc