HOME STUDIO ADVANTAGE
Sarah Harmer makes music in her country cottage

by James Keller

Sarah Harmer works at home. Before recording her latest album, All of Our Names , Harmer transformed her country house outside Kingston into her own personal studio. In the living room sits a drum kit, a piano and a collection of amps, while a mess of cables runs down the stairs.

It looks like a flea-market, she says, and working and living in the same space gave her a sense of ownership over the process she wouldn't have otherwise had.

“This just felt like I was doing it on my terms,” says Harmer, “rather than going into a studio where a lot of people had recorded and feeling like I was client number 1,023.”

This new setup isn't actually that different than where she recorded her previous record, You Were Here . She made that album in a run-down studio in Toronto 's west end that she says used to be a crack den. Even in that case, she liked the organic, bare-bones environment, devoid of some of the flash of the higher-end studios.

“I kind of like the element of the unadorned ramshackle quality, because there was no where to go but up in a way,” she says. “It just had this certain underground quality that I quite like. I don't really like the frills, personally.”

Whether in the ex-crack den or the main floor of her home, Harmer likes the freedom and control these sorts of environments create. This time around, this meant she could take longer to record the album and play more instruments. On All of Our Names, Harmer plays drums and lead guitar, layered over one another through multi-track recording.

Playing more than one instrument and piecing together songs one part at a time invariably shows itself on the record. The new album takes her catchy pop-folk to different level, revealing more complex orchestration with much fuller sounds than her previous work. There's nothing dramatically new, but the songs are thicker, with more depth.

Even still, she says this isn't necessarily a better way to put together a record.

It was really kind of piecemeal with small details coming together instead of five people in a room together creating music spontaneously,” she says. “Sometimes it's slower and less spontaneous, but little by little, we just worked on it and built it up -- it was like building a small city.”