Ellen Froese

About

Saskatoon songsmith Ellen Froese’s latest record, Solitary Songs, finds her meditating on a strange chapter of her life. “It’s been a weird year—lots of life changes, maybe some ego-death,” she says. Between an ADHD diagnosis and cutting back on some vices, her perspective—as a musician, a lover, a human being—has changed.

The follow up to 2022’s For Each Flower Growing (produced with the Sheepdogs’ Sam Corbett), Solitary Songs showcases Froese singing songs that sound like dusted-off country classics with wry, down-to-earth lyricism. One moment, Froese is confessing, ‘I’m scared of getting old / But more than that, I’m scared of living without your love’; the next, she’s reeling from a false-start fling, ‘stray cattin’ along’ with a freshly purchased ‘strawberry watermelon turbo-powered vape’. There are no sacred cows in Froese’s world, with blunt humour meeting heartache while the band plays on.

“Bellflower Blue”, a song that was “written with a nod to heartbreak songs in a specific vein of traditional folk ballads,” explains Froese. “Prolonged stormy weather can erode away parts of you, but the resulting fragility can be a beautiful thing, acting as a guide to new and gentler pastures. Bellflower is a beautiful but deceivingly invasive plant.”

“This record is the outcome of facing non-stop anxiety with songwriting,” Froese says. “I was oscillating back and forth between feeling stuck and feeling like, ‘fuck it, I need to zoom out and have some fun.’” This tension makes Solitary Songs captivating; Froese, chastises herself for overcomplicating things, even if it may be for self-preservation, singing ‘don’t look hard, Ellen’. But she does look hard, turning over the complications—the ex-lover, the rough weather, the lonely hotel bed—meditating on her deeper desires; as her honeyed voice sings, ‘what I seek now is a methodology for peacefulness between my heart and mind’.

Breaking down the role ADHD has played in her life, Froese’s fight against “the damn dopamine hunt” is tracked across Solitary Songs. “If something is intriguing to me, it becomes my entire reality for that time,” Froese explains. Froese excels at self-deprecatingly depicting her own fixations (she muses at one point, ‘I’m thinkin’ and I’m drinkin’ up ways to make you mine’).

Solitary Song sounds like how it was made: hanging out with friends, trying to make one another smile. Recorded at RecHall studios in Saskatoon, this track—and its forthcoming album, Solitary Songs—was crafted during thoroughly collaborative sessions with long-time collaborators. Froese and friends would write new songs during little breaks—like when the engineer Barrett Ross stepped out one evening to look after his kid. The results feel jubilantly off-the-cuff, honest, and immediate.

Though so much has changed in Froese’s life, one fundamental truth remains: she’s deftly penning head-turning songs that invite the listener to let go of the things that are getting them down. It’s flirting with self-acceptance while indulging in a hearty spoonful of self-deprecation; it’s trying to be “happy in the confidence of a solitary song”; it’s getting your friends on board for some cheeky country-folk tunes. And nobody does those quite like Ellen Froese.