Band in Church
Harmer brings five-piece outfit to Westminster United
John Kendle

Sarah Harmer is feeling a little footloose after spending a weekend at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Tex.

Asked how long she thinks she’ll continue to perform with her five-piece acoustic band, the 35-year-old singer/songwriter just laughs.

“Oh, I’m gonna milk it,” she says. “I don’t write that many songs, you know.”

She’s kidding, of course, but Harmer is indeed enjoying the acoustic vibe she’s been riding for the past nine months or so, ever since last June, when she took an acoustic band on an awareness-raising tour of the Niagara Escarpment.

Inspired by a campaign to protect the natural biosphere of the area in which she grew up and where her parents still farm, Harmer and co. spent two weeks trekking, hiking, spelunking and rock climbing along the escarpment, traversing some 80 kilometres between Tobermory and Burlington, Ont. Along the way, she and her musicians played shows to raise funds for an organization called Protecting Escarpment Rural Land.

They’d already recorded the pointed protest song Escarpment Blues as a fundraiser, so it only seemed natural to bring the band into Toronto’s Reaction Studios at tour’s end.

“Patrick (Sambrook, her manager) didn’t have to convince me it was a good idea at all,” Harmer says. “We went in and recorded everything in four days. We had the groove and we had the songs, so (the album) just sort of documents the tour we did last spring.”

The resultant disc was I’m a Mountain, a gently beautiful collection that’s a bit of a departure from the rock-tinged roots pop for which Harmer has been known since her 2000 breakthrough release, You Were Here. With just voices and basic instrumentation, Harmer and band have created an old-time country sound replete with a genuine bluegrass twang.

I’m a Mountain came out in Canada last autumn but is only now being released by Zöe in the States, so Harmer and bandmates Jason Euringer (upright bass and vocals), Julie Fader (accordion, keys and vocals), Chris Bartos (fiddle), Joey Wright (guitar) and Spencer Evans (piano, clarinet) have a full spring and summer of touring ahead of them. A jaunt to Europe is on the agenda for May.

Thus it is that the band will find itself performing at old churches, such as Winnipeg’s Westminster United, throughout Western Canada in the first two weeks of April.

Why churches?

No real reason, says the kid who went to church every Sunday until she was 16 while growing up with her five older siblings on the family farm near Burlington.

“I always want to play somewhere I haven’t played before. So when we were putting this together we were booked in churches across the West,” she says. “It’s only recently that I’ve said, ‘Ooh, what are we doing?’ But with this band it’ll be great.”

While some of Harmer’s pop material doesn’t necessarily fit the bill with her current musical lineup, she is picking tunes from all parts of her songbook — in addition to a few choice covers to go along with her exquisite version of Dolly Parton’s Will He Be Waiting for Me?, from Mountain.

Harmer tunes The Hideout and Lodestar should make the setlist, and recent shows have featured songs by The Shins and Winnipeg group The Weakerthans (Left and Leaving).

“We’re not using drums, so we have to play like we’re not using drums,” the singer says. “Some songs work as well without them as with, but others just don’t.”