Roads scholars Musicians from New York and Barcelona find inspiration in the feminine names of Winnipeg streets By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 7:00 PM CST Friday, Feb. 21, 2020

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This article was published 20/02/2020 (1673 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The streets of Winnipeg have long served as inspiration for musicians who call it home. John K. Samson of the Weakerthans sang about how the “bare bulb of moon swings over Portage Avenue” on Grace General, while Neil Young and Randy Bachman turned our most infamous intersection, Portage and Main, into a shout-along chorus on Prairie Town.

Less common is Winnipeg having the same influence on an art-rock pioneer from New York City and a flamenco guitarist from Barcelona.

For their latest collaboration, Names of North End Women, released Friday, Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Ranaldo and Raül Refree began with notes Ranaldo had jotted down while walking around Winnipeg. Ranaldo has a connection to the city: his wife, multimedia artist Leah Singer, is from here.

Ranaldo and Singer usually come to Winnipeg during the holidays and, during a cold December day two years ago, he recalls noticing, for the first time, that many of Winnipeg streets are named after women. (The album is called Names of North End Women, but most of the inspiration streets, save for Flora and Stella, are located on the other side of the tracks, in Winnipeg’s Centennial neighbourhood: Pearl, Olivia, Lydia, Kate, Juno, Harriet, Gertie, Frances, Ellen, Dagmar, etc.)

“I was fascinated with these street names, and I just thought it was weird that they were first names,” Ranaldo says, over the phone from New York. “They were anonymous names, or universal names, I couldn’t quite figure it out. Later, I parked my car in that super cold winter and wandered the streets and taking pictures of the street signs.

“Every once in a while, one of the streets would be the name of somebody I know, like Lydia or whatever. It kinda felt like it was a ‘this is your life’ moment, like these names were someone from your past, or present, or maybe future. It gave me this very particular feeling. I wrote all the names down as I was walking around in my notebook and it kind of ended up being this column of words.”

Ranaldo says he’s sure it’s not the first time Winnipeg has influenced his music. “But it’s the first time it’s done so in a more literal way.” There’s a song on the album called At the Forks, too.

The column of women’s names served as a spark for an experimental, collage-style album that pulls threads from everywhere, both musically and lyrically. For the lyrics, Ranaldo didn’t worry so much about penning linear songs, instead writing new compositions that suited the melodies, borrowing from archival poems, as well as incorporating lines sent to them by novelist Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn), who worked on the duo’s last album, 2017’s Electric Trim.

Musically, both artists wanted to create under as few constraints as possible. Ranaldo had come in with a handful of demos, but the pair quickly noticed they weren’t using them. “We felt completely free to play around and try new things,” Refree says. “We didn’t have any pressure. We were just having fun.”

“We knew we wanted to move away from rock music and move into landscape-y elements of sound and be as experimental as we could,” Ranaldo adds. “We have a blast when we’re in the studio together. It’s a laboratory situation where we’re trying things. If it doesn’t work one way, we go down a different avenue.”

Moving away from rock music meant putting down their guitars in favour of more unconventional instrumentation.

“We dragged out these old cassette machines and I had some old tapes of gamelan instruments (marimba, vibraphone), so we were mixing stuff we’d recorded live in the studio with these instruments, with sounds from the ’50s or ’60s on these old cassette tapes we bought in Indonesia back in the day,” Ranaldo says. “It was a really fun process of layering all this strata, these high-tech machines and these low-tech machines with analogue hiss.”

The resulting Names of North End Women isn’t necessarily what pops in your head when you think “experimental.” It’s a propulsively rhythmic, gorgeously melodic collection of songs the pair are in the process of figuring out how to play live and take on the road — perhaps, even, to the city that inspired them.

“It would be really cool to play this music in Winnipeg,” Ranaldo says. “It definitely would.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti