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' 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' 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 in Sweetsburg, Quebec, Lynn Miles grew up in a musical home. Her father played the harmonica and listened to his jazz collection while her mother was a lover of both opera and country music. Miles’ mother recalled once that she knew when Lynn had finally fallen asleep in her crib: Lynn stopped singing. During her elementary school years, Miles learned guitar, violin, flute and piano. She began performing in public at around the age of sixteen and when she was in her early twenties she studied with an opera singer to strengthen her voice and enrolled for a time at Carleton University in Ottawa where she studied classical music history and theory. Years later, Miles put this training to good use while serving as a voice teacher at the Ottawa Folklore Center. While at the center, she taught voice to many students including a then fourteen-year-old Alanis Morrisette. The lessons came just prior to the making of Morrisette’s first album.
Though Miles had been writing her own songs since the age of 10, she didn’t end up recording any of her own material until 1987 when she cut 9 original compositions for a demo at Happyrock Studio in Ottawa. An avid reader and music-lover, those early recordings were inspired by the books she loved to read, and the music she listened to on the radio. Miles continues to draw inspiration from music and literature to this day. On her latest album, Love Sweet Love for example, the opening track, “Flames of Love,” was inspired by a long period of reading Sufi poetry. "I’m fascinated by the way the Sufis write about love," Miles says. "Their love is spiritual, and I reinterpreted it and wrote ‘Flames of Love,’ about jumping in the fire, Lynn Miles 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 blindsided 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 unbridled ecstasy 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 Top 10 Pick of the Year. Unravel (released 2001) was praised by critics – All Music Guide describing it as "sounding as if it's been produced by Daniel Lanois in an Appalachian 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 may have said it best: "Lynn Miles makes being forlorn sound like a state of grace."
Her latest album, Love Sweet Love (Red House Records), is a road album. Songs like “Night Drive”, “Sweet and Tender Heart”, “8 Hour Drive” and “Never Coming Back” trace the metaphorical journey of the human heart, sketching a roadmap of modern relationships and heartache. Miles recorded Love Sweet Love with a first-rate collection of Canadian musicians: Unravel producer, guitarist, longtime-friend and collaborator Ian LeFeuvre and drummer Peter Von Althen (both of the Canadian band Starling); Chelsea Bridge double-bassist John Geggiem; Prairie Oyster guitarist Keith Glass and violinist James Stephens all lend their talents to Love Sweet Love. The result of this collaboration is a warm, hopeful sound in perfect harmony with Miles’ smart, heartbreaking lyrics.
