Concert Preview
Great Lake Swimmers, March 27, 7:15 pm, West End Cultural Centre
Rob Nay

For its third evocative record, Great Lake Swimmers drew together a wide assortment of acclaimed guests to add rich layers of sound to the group’s wistful pop and alt-country songs.

“I was just hoping that the planets aligned to work with these amazing people with very busy schedules,” says Tony Dekker, singer, guitarist and songwriter for GLS.

Dekker says all the guests were friends whose work he admired, and the likes of Sarah Harmer, Blue Rodeo’s Bob Egan and Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallett joined Dekker and GLS core members Erik Arnesen (banjo, electric guitar) and Colin Huebert (drums, percussion) on the group’s latest, Ongiara.

Highly textured but never dense, the disc makes each instrument and voice clearly distinguishable, enhancing songs that resonate with both elegiac and uplifting sentiments. Dekker says the involvement of a variety of singers and musicians led to a change in his approach to arranging music.

“It was a bit of a new thing for me to collaborate with people on parts for songs,” he says. “I had maintained control before, but this time I wanted a lot more instruments involved. It was a great experience.”

As was the case with two previous GLS albums, choosing a distinctive place to record also played a key role in capturing the songs on the new disc. The group completed its self-titled debut in an abandoned grain silo and refined its second record, Bodies and Minds, in a rural lakeside church. For Ongiara they recorded the songs in Aeolian Hall, a 19th-century London, Ont., venue Dekker knew about through concerts he saw there while attending university years ago.

“You get something that you can’t really get out of a factory reverb or a manufactured reverb,” Dekker says, explaining why he prefers offbeat settings rather than studios for recording. “To me, you can’t really replace that kind of sound, and it makes the making of the album more of an experience. too. It makes the process more important in an artistic sense.

“It’s just something that I find interesting, to capture natural acoustics. It lends an atmosphere to the recording.”

With their deep, lingering melodies and lush instrumentation, Ongiara’s songs transparently show the benefits Aeolian Hall’s gorgeous acoustics.

Adeptly engineered by Andy Magoffin of The Two-Minute Miracles, Ongiara takes its moniker from the name of the boat that took the group to the disc’s preproduction sessions on Toronto Island with Dale Morningstar.

Lyrically, many of the album’s songs focus on the natural environment, and many are partly inspired by the numerous locations the group has visited during tours over the past couple of years.

Despite extensive experience playing live, Dekker says he initially felt uneasy with getting up in front of an audience.

“I’m still a bit uncomfortable (performing live) but I’ve gotten better at hiding it,” he says.