Megan Hamilton- Forty Warm Streams to Lead Your Wings

Megan Hamilton- Forty Warm Streams to Lead Your Wings

A review by Nat Bourgon

November 16^th, 2015

In early 2009, Megan Hamilton released her sonically articulate, lyrically pensive second full-length album, See Your Midnight Breath in the Shipyard and went on a lengthy tour to support it.  However, a combination of tour related setbacks and a lack of momentum with the record release left her feeling like she had lost that feeling of elation that used to come with playing music. She felt burnt out from the concept of music making as a career path, and weighed down by logistics and technicalities. To combat these barriers, and to allow the winds of change their chance to whistle, she moved to Kingston, got married, and took a break from music. She started a new day job, and had a baby. 

By 2013, with her palate cleansed, and her personal life stabilized, Hamilton began to crave the feelings that emanate from the art of creation. She missed the threads of connectivity that surface though the brand of intimate sharing which songwriting calls for. After meeting Ottawa-based producer Jim Bryson at a concert and striking up a friendship with him, Megan began to dip her toes back into musicianship, only this time completely as a labour of love, void of the pressures and expectations that muddled her experience four years earlier.  Her collaboration with Bryson led to Snow Moon, a three song EP, released in fall 2013. Snow Moon was a more propped up, emboldened set than her back catalogue prepped us for. The collection included the frothy, vitalized career highlight “Tuesdays are the Loneliest Nights." Listening to Snow Moon, I could discern that Hamilton was back to making music for herself first and foremost. I could tell that she was experiencing a renaissance in her relationship with the creative muses. I knew that even bigger and better things were to come for her and her talents.

Flash forward two years to fall 2015, and my prediction has come true with emphatic verve. With the release of Megan Hamilton’s new album Forty Warm Streams to Lead Your Wings, her first full-length release in six and a half years, she has created her most consummated, dynamic entry to date in her already tall cabinet of music undertakings. Forty Warm Streams to Lead Your Wings is a record that uncorks the cryptic ethos of contrasts. The tracks here consider the double entendre of self-awareness. From one angle, Hamilton’s album divulges the calibre of tallying self-confidence, thanks to learning from and building on past experiences. From another slant, the record simultaneously delves into the thorn of aging and approaching midlife. It’s a record that seeks to reconcile the voluminous amounts of selfless giving that successful motherhood and marriage necessitate, with the personal fuel and mountainous sense of satisfaction gained by pouring pails of energy into the self-serving requisite of music making.

Forty Warm Streams to Lead Your Wings looks the realities of the human condition intently in the eye, and grins at its imperfections. The record plays perennial tug of war between the blues of emotional recession and the merriment of achieving unprecedented levels of success. Megan Hamilton has a penchant for being truthful without succumbing to cynicism or bitterness. From top to bottom, this a gutsy record, chalk full of courageous revelations and remedy protocols. Megan refuses to sugarcoat the dissonance encountered in day-to-day life, yet she laments whilst sporting a pair of custom-order shades that still see hope looming on the horizon.

Hamilton promotes the record’s consumer from eavesdropping passenger to active participator. Her songs invite the listener to have an invested stake in each moment. The listener is welcomed to partake in the pondering sessions and discourse that transpire within her anthems.

Early on in album’s lead off track “You Are”, there is a moment when Megan Hamilton voice belts out the words “so old.” It is as if she challenges time’s indentation to a full-on duel, and then takes pride in her resultant clean-sweep. This instant only teasingly infers to Megan’s crafty vocal remodelling. Her tender, graceful simmer arises in instances throughout Streams, but she has now instigated a yelping, intensive plea to go along with her whispery delivery of yore. Her voice sounds more prosperous and resolute on these new songs. She sounds engaged with the tunes and harmonies. It sounds as though these songs were written with the merits of her voice squarely in mind.

“You Are” moves the tension between the domesticated life, and artistic dreams into unabridged focus. “All my goals become so old/But my heart is new.” The lyrically driven track places Hamilton’s voice noticeably upfront in the mix. A rustling acoustic guitar provides an allotment of company to minimalism’s bachelor lifestyle, and eases the lonesome symptoms marginally. Melodically inclined string passages carry the song through its final third, conjuring up memories of when the sun peaked through the clouds momentarily, before retreating once again backstage.

At the song’s beginning, Hamilton sounds distracted and scattered. She comes across as overwhelmingly immersed in reflection, and facing a surplus of question marks, with slim answers. However, by the song’s end, Hamilton sounds engaged in the art of mindfulness, keenly existing in the moment, and well balanced enough to enjoy it all: music, motherhood and love. The stunning realization she gets to by the song’s closing corner is the way in which motherhood and love can actually inspire music productivity. Sure, more planning and care is needed when juggling familial lives with the introversion of writing and the time commitments of performing and touring. But, “You Are” is her memo to herself that her family life has provided her with the tools needed to experience fulfillment in her music life. When she wraps the song with the line, “My heart is full of you”, we get the sense that she is finally seeing the light. “You Are” chronicles Hamilton journey of altering the relationship between art and family from one of fierce rivals to complimentary muses.

“4am” is a peppy number. It evokes childhood friends in the ward of adolescence, engaging in cycles of trampoline leaping. Arms are waving proudly in the air, and the troops are indulging in the carefree spirit offered up by Saturday afternoon summer days. This youthful imagery is skilfully marred by the fatigue inherent in the lyrics, stemming from sleep-shy nights, and the 24-7 on-call lifestyle of being a primary caregiver of a toddler. “It’s 4am and I’m feeling blue/But from this bed at 4am/There ain’t a lot that you can do.”

Surging electric guitar parading, and quaking alleys of percussion domineer in “4am”. Hamilton performs vocal aerobics here, to tap into a realm where the shadowy is willing to compromise with the soothing.

In “Radio Radio” Hamilton’s coo is dressed up in seductive attire. She rhumbas in the lower end of her register to deliver the most steamy, provocative vocal performance of her career to date. Her spicy vocal trickles through the encircling instrumentation’s organic filter. Hence, the soundscape here feels reminiscent of yoga breathing patterns. The dynamics are given space to inhale and exhale without stringent pressure to advance. Strings whisk in prior to the endpoint, like in “You Are”. But whereas in the opening track, the strings feel civilized and brimming with humanity, in “Radio Radio” they feel transporting, and otherworldly, like a wild, untamed river rafting ride, jolting your primitive side onto the leaderboard with the off-switch thrown overboard.

“The Waiting Game” is a brief, jittery sweat of anticipation, honouring the in-between, transitional nature of pregnancy. It is a document of the bodily and mental changes as she nourished and supported her not-yet-born child. This zippy spark plug of a tune captures the dichotomy between preparing and awaiting. This is an ode to days of limbo, with an arch life change ready to mount. “The Waiting Game” incorporates some pop texture, and a catchy nucleus, lending it immediacy. This song also continues to audit the complex relationship between motherhood and art. Hamilton tries to ease her butterflies about being a first time mom by reminding herself of how there was once a time when her music equipment and musical terminology were foreign strangers to her, and how with time and practice, they are now second nature. “Tempo up the metronome/Set the proper speed/They tell you in the books/But don’t forget to breathe/Just play through this bar/This is still the waiting game.”

“The Waiting Game” is Hamilton’s self-addressed envelope that just like she has grown into a proven veteran with her musical equipment, and just as she has become a fluent speaker of the music language and its specialized jargon, she can and will find her stride as a mother.

 For all of the chance taking and experimentation that pervades Forty Warm Streams to Lead Your Wings, it is the quintessential sounding Megan Hamilton serenade entitled “The Violins” that resonates the most. Piano garnishes tread lightly, providing a lifting innuendo. “The Violins” finds Hamilton facing up to her previous departure from the music scene, and narrates her later expedition toward falling in love with music making again. “And you can’t remember when you stopped/Believing in the violins/And you don’t remember what you were/Before you learned to silence it.”

This is a song Hamilton wrote about coming to terms with the fact that she is a music lifer. Yes, she took a break for a time, but “The Violins” is a pledge of allegiance to music’s role in her present and future tense. This is her self-penned declaration that she is in it for the long haul. It’s her reconciliation request to music itself, asking for second chance, and promising to stay. “The Violins” is Hamilton embracing her mission as an artist, and making a renewed commitment to that mission.

“$5&U” is a delightfully grimy, pungent experience. The song is the equivalent of witnessing the air-drying of dirty laundry on the clothesline, only for the bombshell to be dropped that the clothes haven’t gone through the washer first. Her singing sounds ragged, emulating the messy whiff of the hanging clothes. The song provides a reality check that love is not all daisies and dalliance. A deliberately angular quality is applied to her voice as an aesthetic choice, which adds to the blunt tonality of the song. Musically, the song jounces and jolts with rock and roll pizazz, and the exhilaration of sprint runners. “$5&U” is Hamilton’s chance to tell it like it is; to let it all hang out there: nauseous, unwashed odours of tense emotion and all.

“Bruised Fruit” begins with a cymbal-like stencil of sound. Squiggly shocks of electronica land on the rhythmical ripples, mimicking the surge of electrical devices repeatedly plugged in and then immediately yanked out.  These shocks accentuate the song’s uncanny frenzy.

“Late Bloomer” exhibits the range of Megan Hamilton’s vocal chord registry. The song alternates between employing her prettier, chestier voice, and her harsher, throaty vex. Lush instincts meld with a stormy thrust. The delightfully dingy production smudges a blackened clot of mystique over the otherwise sporty guitar, creating visually inclined imagery of a hail downpour straddling the line between spongy and menacing. Lyrically, she pours out her heart about being amongst the last of her clan of peers to have certain life experiences and realize certain longstanding dreams. “I’ve always been late/And even then I push it/Don’t want to be passed over/Don’t want to be left behind” She then utilizes a comparison to ensure it hits home just how far behind she feels she is lagging. “I like watching you/You take your time/You don’t need to hurry/You don’t need to feel different/I’m a late bloomer...”

In “Ten Cent Beer”, Hamilton unleashes her customarily fogged countrified leanings, stashed deep within, and discovers that the glove fits impeccably. She learns through this track that folk-pop is far from her only forte: She sounds so at home here as a southern balladeer with a specialization in the drab and the dreary. This is the closest Megan has gotten to funnelling a honky-tonk chanteuse. She demands her electric guitar to take on the demeanour of twang, and it complies with resounding agreeability. Her voice has never sounded so startlingly elastic and ashy.

“November” leans and wavers like a clued in but undeveloped four-year old perched on a swing set, requiring a lightweight but propelling gust of mobility from his parental units to fly high. It feels like an eulogy for a lost love one, as if the swing set ride exposes the innocence of the former relationship she shared with her lost pal. Hamilton is left longing for the comfort and reassurance of that feathery, delicate but sturdy swing set push to guide her forward and help her survive in a brave new world without her friend to walk through life with.

Closer “Soft Cheek/Violet Rain” feels almost hymnal, with its choral sounding vocal. This swan song carries a spiritual vibe, and wraps the album on an optimistic note.

40 Warm Streams to Lead Your Wings is firsthand proof that an expansive personal life doesn’t have to mean the freezing of artistic growth. Rather, Hamilton’s album demonstrates that having a full familial life, and an abundance of love can actually lead to an uptick in artistic activity.  This is the most coherent, enlightened and well-bred record of Megan Hamilton’s depository.  In 40 Warm Streams to Lead Your Wings, Hamilton has delivered the goods and some. This record sees Hamilton make the leap from extraordinary songwriter to connoisseur of creativity. This is a record that earns top wages in both the salary of experimentalism, and the tips of universality. 40 Warm Streams to Lead Your Wings is that special place where hidden treasures worth discovering, and employable, far-reaching truths worth implementing hold hands in conjoined matrimony.