Basia Bulat is releasing The Garden, a new album of orchestral reimaginings of songs from throughout her discography, due out Friday (2/25) digitally with a physical release to follow on March 25 via Secret City. Basia produced the album's sixteen tracks with Mark Lawson (Arcade Fire, Beirut) and they feature string arrangements from Owen Pallett, Paul Frith, and Zou Zou Robidoux, performed by violinists John Corban and Tomo Newton, violist Jen Thiessen, harpist Sarah Page, and Robidoux on cello. The lush, gorgeous arrangements flesh out the songs, bringing new life into them, and you can hear The Garden versions of "Fables" and the title track below.
Ahead of the album's release, we asked Basia about its influences, and she gave us a list that includes songs, albums, her garden, and more. Read her list, complete with commentary, below.
Basia was forced to cancel her February and March European and UK tour dates because of Covid, but she still has shows scheduled in April, including a few supporting Mt. Joy. See all of her upcoming dates below.
BASIA BULAT: 10 INFLUENCES BEHIND THE GARDEN
1. Bjork At the Chapel with the Brodsky Quartet
A friend gave me a burned CD bootleg of this concert when I was in high school and I still have it! Bjork has always been an inspiration to me as a singer and songwriter, and the energy of this live recording, almost burning through the speakers like all her albums do, is something that still thrills me years later.
2. Willie Nelson - Spotlight on Willie Nelson LP
One of the things that got me through the isolation of being pregnant during the pandemic was going through all my old folk and country LPs looking for weird or different versions of the same song but sung by the same artist. Some of my favourite artists cover the same standard a few times over their career, and some rework their own songs a few times too. I think of that as different than changing the arrangement for live performance, because a recorded version usually is seen by fans as ‘the’ version... so I've always loved that this isn't always the case for folk and country. Especially with the older records, I love how it feels like this unspoken rule that the song gets to have a life of its own and decide how and when it goes dormant/blooms, even within its own writer’s catalog.
Willie Nelson is the ultimate example of this kind of thing to me because so many people have covered him and had hits, he’s famous for his covers of standards, and he’s done new versions of his own tunes too - so I was digging into his back catalog a lot while making the album. He’s got several versions of “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” recorded in different eras and revisits other tunes on a few different records... this one version of Merle's “Today I Started Loving You Again" is so different from another version he did which came out years later...