Sarah Slean cultivates challenging but fruitful love affair with chamber music

The classically trained singer-songwriter and pianist is heading to the West Coast for a pair of shows with Black Dog String Quartet, at BlueShore at CapU and the Shadbolt

By Alexander Varty

Sarah Slean

Sarah Slean performs with Black Dog String Quartet at BlueShore at CapU on October 3 and the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on October 4. Both shows are at 7:30 pm

AS SARAH SLEAN HERSELF admits, she is never less than “irrepressibly positive”. So it’s hard to imagine the Toronto-based singer, songwriter, and pianist entertaining anything like self-doubt, but it has happened—once or twice, and quite some time ago.

“When I was young, I was in dive bars in Germany playing my songs, and I did have a moment when I thought ‘Is this what I’m doing with my intelligence and my ability?’” she confesses, in an otherwise upbeat phone interview from her home. “‘Am I playing this shitty bar where my feet stick to the ground?’ Like, ‘What?’”

Slean laughs, and quickly returns to form. “But I have those moments less and less, because I think over the years I have really just refined my practice such that I am in places where I want to be, doing the music that I want to be, and doing with the people I want to be doing it with,” she explains. “That took some time, because the pop-music thing is a bit of a grind. You have to be adaptable, and you just really have to love music. Like, there are so many other avenues that musicians could have taken, so many easier paths in life. But that wasn’t even an option for me. I just love music too much.”

For those who place pop at the the pinnacle of artistic creation, there might be reason to question Slean’s confidence. After all, it’s been eight years since the release of her last solo album, Metaphysics, and that’s an eternity in the usual showbiz cycle of record, release, and tour. But it’s not like she’s been idle.

I love the challenge of writing for a quartet, because it is a limitation.

In addition to surviving the ubiquitous COVID hiccup, Slean has toured an orchestral homage to one of her chief inspirations, Joni Mitchell, with arrangements by esteemed jazz composer and Mitchell collaborator Vince Mendoza; crafted the Reimagining Broadway show-tune spectacle alongside pianist and composer Mike Janzen; written a show’s worth of songs for a National Arts Centre/Theatre Calgary tribute to Nova Scotia folk-art legend Maud Lewis; sung 20th- and 21st-century art-pop songs with Toronto’s Art of Time Ensemble; and is currently finishing a commission for the Stratford Festival.

Have we forgotten anything? Well, during Slean’s spare time she also earned a master’s degree in composition, signed on to teach film scoring and songwriting at York University, and gave birth to a daughter, who’s now four. There will also be a new album of her own songs, which she’s hoping to release in 2026.

Writing for film and theatre, Slean says, is “a totally different thing than making a new Sarah Slean project”.

“I find that I personally don’t write songs unless something totally massive has changed in me—a revelation, or a shift, or some life experience that’s sort of embedded itself in me and changed me somehow,” she explains. “And there are few changes in life that are as massive as having a child, so that has really, really stirred the creative wellspring, to be sure. There’s a lot to be said there. I’m not with her father, and that was very complicated, so there’s a lot of that that had to settle into me and get sorted before i could write about it. And, I mean, there’s also being, like, almost 50 in the music industry and being a woman in this weird world, in this incredibly weird world that we’re in, which is very volatile. There’s so much disturbance in the consciousness. I don’t know if you feel that too, but there’s so much ready to burst, and so much that wants to be reborn. I just have that feeling all the time these days, and, yeah, you can’t not write about that.”

Sarah Slean.

Those eager to hear Slean’s take on modern life will have two chances this month: she’s playing North Vancouver’s BlueShore at CapU on Friday and Burnaby’s Shadbolt Centre for the Arts on Saturday. Both concerts will feature new material alongside a selection of career highlights, and both will find the singer and pianist in what might be the best of all musical scenarios: accompanied by the skilled, sympathetic, and adventurous Black Dog String Quartet.

While Slean notes that at the moment she’s strongly drawn to orchestral settings—large-scale collaborations, she contends, are “very exciting, creatively”—there’s something about the combination of voice, piano, and string quartet that allows for both emotional intimacy and sonic adventure.

“I love chamber music,” says the classically trained musician. “I love the sound of a quartet, and the challenge of writing for a quartet, because it is a limitation. It’s a unique sound, so it’s particularly challenging to get different sounds out of it. But it’s also a really efficient way to perform shows. Because classical players are the way they are, you send them the music and you show up and have a 90-minute rehearsal and everything is fantastic, right? Pop bands are different. You have to find players that you kind of jell wth; you have to rehearse fairly regularly to maintain your synchrony…

“A band is a whole other thing but string players are fantastically literate and adaptable and you can just pop them right in and they play beautifully,” she adds. “I just love that sound and aesthetic so much. In fact, I feel like it’s more of a natural setting for me than pop ever was, to be honest.”

Granted, there was a time when Slean “couldn’t run away fast enough” from classical music, but maybe those sticky-floored foreign bars taught her something: you don’t have to abandon your past to make a better future.

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