Artist Profile-Great Lake Swimmers

Lake Effect

Tony Dekker’s Great Lake Swimmers evoke Ontario’s land- and waterscapes with songs that have gained an international audience

By Ned Morgan

We’re late for the 2008 Mariposa Folk Festival. I’m the one who’s supposed to know the way from our campsite outside Orillia to the downtown concert venue Tudhope Park. I don’t, as it turns out. I had an image in my head of a right turn, a left, and then maybe another right, aided by clearly worded road signs. All this fell apart with a single wrong turn.

After everyone realizes I’ve navigated us in the wrong direction, I begin to sulk, angry with myself. If alone, I would’ve cursed myself in the privacy of my car. But I’m with two friends, both too well-mannered to give me a hard time. Being lost and late solo is bad enough, but when I make my friends lost and late too – and we all miss irreplaceable minutes of live Great Lake Swimmers music – it’s worse.

As the band name implies, Great Lake Swimmers’ music is very much of a place – but not just one place. Singer-songwriter Tony Dekker was born in Wainfleet, a small town in Southern Ontario not far from Lake Erie. Dekker along with core members Erik Arnesen (banjo, electric guitar) and Colin Huebert (drums, percussion, glockenspiel, timpani) recorded the self-titled debut in 2003 in an abandoned silo near Dekker’s hometown. His plaintive, soaring vocals, thoughtful lyrics, and ebb-and-flow melodies, along with the band’s roomy folk-country-rock arrangements, gained international recognition. But other elements stand out as the stars, in a way, of the first album: the crickets, the wind and the rain.

“Recording the first album in the silo, we ended up picking up a lot more environmental sounds from the surrounding fields than I thought we would,” says Dekker, over the phone recently. “Choruses of crickets, wind and a bit of rain. We had to make the decision to try to EQ them out, or just leave everything in. We decided to work with them … so we ended up with this ambient sound running through the songs, which wasn’t intentional at first.”

The result is a sonic signature that couldn’t be cooked up in a studio. This is the background sound of nature itself and to anyone raised rurally or semi-rurally, it’s so familiar that we hardly hear it. Says Dekker, “We like to use the place we record in almost as another instrument, or another member of the band.”

Great Lake Swimmers’ latest album Ongiara is a more polished, filled-out recording, with guest backing vocalists Serena Ryder and Sarah Harmer, string arrangements by Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy and The Arcade Fire, and numerous guest players. Again, Ongiara is a music of place, but the band traded Wainfleet crickets for the famed natural reverb of London’s Aeolian Hall, where they recorded most of the album. Ongiara is the name of the boat that ferried the band to an additional recording session on Toronto Island.

The album opener “Your Rocky Spine” is that rare thing, a love song about rocks, where the landscape is interchangeable with a human body. The lyric “Floating over your rocky spine/The glaciers made you and now you’re mine” suggested to me the Niagara Escarpment. After Dekker told me that he liked to hike on the Bruce Trail, I asked him about his inspiration for the lyrics. “We were touring when I wrote the song and it’s a lot of things rolled into one. But having grown up near the Escarpment … that probably came from deep in my well of images.”

From the ambient sounds on the first album to the photos of the Lake Erie shore on the second album Bodies and Minds to the nature imagery in many of his songs, it’s clear that the natural environment is central to Dekker. “I Could be Nothing,” a beautiful dirge-like track from Bodies and Minds, picks out a lulling melody that seems to spring from the movements of waves on a shore. It contains one of Dekker’s most haunting couplets: “Said the waves to the sand, ‘I could be nothing without you.’”

When I asked Dekker if he considered himself an environmentalist he answered emphatically in the affirmative, though he hoped it was “not in the preachy or maybe trendy way. I’d like my music to be an example of how to show more respect for the environment … and maybe feel a bit more fear of it.”

American folk music of the first half of the twentieth century – an era of music influential to Dekker – is often very dark, with strong currents of fear and even despair. Many ballads from the famed Anthology of American Folk Music concern the hardships of rural life and contain a lyrical reverence for the elements. The first time I heard GLS, I knew I was listening to a new band, but it evoked quite another age – which one, I couldn’t say. Dekker’s singing voice carries this ambiguous quality; though he is a young man, his voice is somehow both young and old, of both today and yesterday.

Finally approaching Tudhope Park, through our open car-windows we hear the Great Lake Swimmers playing. How many songs have we missed? Two? Five? We rush into the Park and find a patch of grass. The low-key crowd is made up of lots of families and well-preserved retirees, with scores of neo-bohemians clustered near the front of the stage. These youths, in particular the young men with their beards and desert boots, would have fit right in during the Beatnik first year of the festival, 47 years ago.
As Serena Ryder joins Tony Dekker for “Your Rocky Spine” I hear how little studio trickery props up the GLS sound, for live, it is nearly identical to the record and Dekker’s voice is supernatural in its clarity and sureness. The final number, “There is a Light,” a downtempo acoustic-guitar anthem underpinned by a delicate glockenspiel melody, finds me lying back on my blanket gazing up at the big maple trees far above and the clear sky, just beginning to show the amber tint of the impending sunset. The song spirits away my petty annoyances and does what all art should – it takes me out of myself and shows me the better side of the day.