A solo performance by singer-songwriter Charlotte Wrinch at the Persephone Brewing Company on Jan. 22 demonstrated the artist’s genre-leaping versatility. Her two-hour set, delivered to plexiglass-partitioned patrons of the Gibsons brewery’s tasting room, also situated Wrinch among the vanguard of courageous artists leading a return to normalcy.“I’ve only just played during Omicron at Persephone and the Gibsons Public Market,” said
Wrinch, who in her three decades of residency on the Sunshine Coast has appeared at scores of festivals and lounges. “Now it kind of seems like everybody just wants to be normal and enjoy themselves.”Wrinch accompanied herself with an amplified acoustic guitar, although she is a multi-instrumentalist by nature. For her 2014 CD release of original songs, Kiss the Ground, she arranged string and percussion settings and featured instruments—the recorder and the violin—mastered during her Vancouver childhood.
But it was her father, a record collector and audiophile, who sharpened Wrinch’s appetite for musical eclecticism.
“When I was a little girl, I helped build his sound systems with him,” she remembers. “We put together his big JBL speaker towers. He had all of this amazing equipment, a beautiful turntable and an amazing collection of records. So that’s how I was raised: listening to high-fidelity music and a wide variety. When I would come home from school, I could hear the music well before I got to the front door of the house.”
Her father’s vast collection of jazz, romantic compositions, and contemporary rock (including bubblegum pop ensembles like The Archies) inspired Wrinch’s wide-ranging musical tastes.
She admits a particular fondness for music of the 1930s. Even though songs like Herman Hupfeld’s As Time Goes By and George Gershwin’s Summertime were penned some 40 years before her birth, Wrinch finds they still hold appeal for contemporary audiences.
During Saturday’s performance she moved seamlessly across eras and styles. At one point she followed the soft Brazilian rhythm of Antônio Carlos Jobim’s One Note Samba with Elvis Presley’s 1961 ballad, Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.
Her own songs, like Walk in the Woods and Time to Kill, feature a sunny mix of folk and rock inspired by quintessential West Coast landscapes and lifestyles. Ten years ago, she released a single, Oh Canada, that catalogues distinctive features of life above the 49th parallel.“It was a personal challenge that I made to myself: could you write an anthem? And then I found myself writing it while driving. It [explores] aspects of being Canadian, and each item in the song”—including fathometersand insulin, basketball and zippers—”is a Canadian first.”
Wrinch’s inventiveness extends beyond musical craftsmanship. At the Persephone show, she employed a handmade wooden device to minimize audio interference. She modeled its design on a drink coaster spotted during a night out with friends. Wrinch says her brand of creativity is most at home in such social settings.
“A handful of musicians would never just sit in a corner and play. But I have the opportunity to create this atmospheric backdrop. That’s my contribution to the room and the entire scene, by hanging songs on it.”
Charlotte Wrinch returns to Persephone’s Brewing Company on February 12, and will perform at the Gibsons Public Market on March 5.
