{"id":3683,"date":"2012-02-03T14:16:37","date_gmt":"2012-02-03T20:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=3683"},"modified":"2012-02-03T14:16:37","modified_gmt":"2012-02-03T20:16:37","slug":"how-sweet-it-is-oh-my-darling-strikes-a-deft-balance-on-their-sophomore-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2012\/02\/03\/how-sweet-it-is-oh-my-darling-strikes-a-deft-balance-on-their-sophomore-album\/","title":{"rendered":"How Sweet It Is :: Oh My Darling strikes a deft balance on their sophomore album."},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nBy Michael Elves<\/strong><\/p>\n

They may have entitled their album Sweet Nostalgia<\/em>, but Winnipeg\u2019s Oh My Darling <\/a>wasn\u2019t looking back longingly when they went into the studio to record it. Instead, the roots quartet (consisting of Rosalynn Dennett on fiddle, Allison de Groot on clawhammer banjo, Marie-Jos\u00e9e Dandeneau on upright and electric bass, and Vanessa Kuzina on vocals, guitar and mandolin) was clearly focused on the present and the future with their sophomore full-length.
\n\u201cWe knew we wanted to have a different sound for this record \u2013 not necessarily something that was surpassing the other record, but just something very different,\u201d notes Dennett, explaining that \u201cwe definitely wanted to incorporate more of our live sound in it so our whole method for recording this album was very, very different from the way we did our first one. We mostly did it live off the floor, all in the same room, playing together, focusing on the acoustic sound and capturing the energy of our live performances.\u201d
\nAiding them in their attempt to capture that energy was Juno-award-winning producer Steve Dawson<\/a>, an accomplished musician in his own right.
\n\u201cWe were a huge admirer of Steve Dawson for both his producing and his musicianship. We met him at the Western Canadian Music Awards when we were nominated a couple of years ago and kind-of followed him around a little bit star struck,\u201d Dennett relates of how they made their connection with Dawson. \u201cHe\u2019s definitely been a huge inspiration for us so when we got him into the studio and started working with him he had a lot to say in terms of the overall sound. He really embraced the idea of doing it live \u2013 he was a big push for that whole thing. We had a lot of the stuff pretty arranged but there were some songs we essentially wrote in the studio, that we hadn\u2019t played live before and so he really helped shape that \u2013 and he plays some really rippin\u2019 solos on it too,\u201d she notes excitedly.
\nBandmate Kuzina chimes in with credit to a second figure: \u201cWe recorded the album over seven days in a straw bale house and studio with Don Benedictson in beautiful Roseisle, Manitoba.\u201d
\nAs important as the recording process was for Oh My Darling, Sweet Nostalgia\u2019s strength lies in its material and for that the band found a balance between the old and the new in crafting a collection that Dennett calls \u201cmore representative of how we sound live.\u201d
\n\u201cThe collection of songs on Sweet Nostalgia is a mix of some of the songs we\u2019ve been doing since the very beginning. Like \u2018Roustabout\u2019 is the first song we ever all learned and performed together and so that one always felt really good to us,\u201d notes Kuzina.
\nAs to the new material, she concludes: \u201cOur writing was really starting to form in a way where we were finding just the right balance between our inspiration and our love of old-time and traditional music but marrying that with some new sounds in our original material. It definitely speaks a bit to the past and hints at some of our older work too, but is moving forward in a way that way more cohesive \u2013 we\u2019re finding a way to balance all of our different inspirations and passions.\u201d<\/p>\n

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By Michael Elves They may have entitled their album Sweet Nostalgia, but Winnipeg\u2019s Oh My Darling wasn\u2019t looking back longingly when they went into the studio to record it. Instead, the roots quartet (consisting of Rosalynn Dennett on fiddle, Allison de Groot on clawhammer banjo, Marie-Jos\u00e9e Dandeneau on upright and electric bass, and Vanessa Kuzina […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[360,563],"class_list":["post-3683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","tag-folk","tag-local"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}