Timber Timbre
The Stool Pigeon, 2011
The bare-all conviction of Taylor Kirk's singing voice can be traced back to an existential crisis. Before Bon Iver built a career on his man-withdraws-to-cabin back story, Kirk quietly did the same, forming Timber Timbre with an alt-folk album he prefers not to dwell on.
“I was deeply depressed; kind of just trying to put my life in order,” he says. “I had to leave Toronto and be on my own for a bit.”
At a farmhouse in rural Ontario, where he grew up, Kirk laboured through maintenance work for friends while recording on a four-track at night. Previously a drummer with a rock and jazz background, he found himself picking up a Bible and an acoustic guitar, discovering a new way to express himself.
“I did turn to faith,” he says. “That coincided with discovering all these early recordings of spiritual music, so it all came together at a formative time. I tried to emulate the feeling of those recordings and find heavy metaphors I could hide behind.”
Three albums after that first release, 2006’s Cedar Shakes, the crackling fidelity has been polished, the instrumentation enriched, but the essence remains the same. There are spells and séances, hunters and heretics, always tussling between light and darkness. The songs hum with a spectral magnetism, the glowing embers of gothic country and backwoods blues stoked to sound fresh.
“I used to think that making music meant reinventing the wheel, so for a long time I was just doing what I thought would be the obvious thing to do. Eventually I just stopped... resisting. I allowed myself to follow that traditional meter or whatever: the thing that came naturally, the thing that is in our collective unconscious from the history of music. It’s all been done, for the most part, on record.”
Timber Timbre’s latest, Creep On Creepin’ On, catches the band at their most popular, with a “daunting” 18 months of touring ahead. Yet Kirk still remains something of an enigma. His bandmates, multi-instrumentalists Mika Posen and Simon Trottier were lined up, one after the other, when an interview was requested.
Unsurprisingly, Kirk’s will to preserve an aura of mystery around the music makes him a reluctant interviewee. Sitting in a Montreal café, his sentences are fragmented with uncertainty, an apologetic “I don’t know” truncating most answers.
But then an incident is mentioned. While performing at London’s Rough Trade East last May, Kirk halted the show to chide a woman for taking pictures. It was an uncomfortable moment and one Kirk sighs over now. “I felt so awful to single her out like that but at the same time I was mad.”
He intensifies unexpectedly, becoming assured for the first time. “It spoils it when every detail of an artist is revealed by a Google search,” he adds. “It’s amazing to me that we’ve got to this point where we go into a show knowing that it will be on the internet in a few hours in the shittiest medium. And for what? I don’t get the motivation. I just don’t understand it. I think it’s a real shame.”
Kirk, 29, has little time for perfectionism either. He avoids rehearsals and multiple takes, doesn’t listen back to the albums once they’re finished and doesn’t try to sell the older material at shows or work them into performances. When his bandmates first met, it was the night they made their live debut in Timber Timbre.
But perhaps he’s on to something, given the number of spine-tingling moments – well-placed whispers, thundering kick drums, melodic epiphanies – springing from the music’s darkest passages.
“That’s the most exciting thing,” he says. “But I never know. The excitement of capturing a really nice moment on record feels so fleeting; I think it’s impossible to identify when that’s happening. But a physical response to a song – yeah!” He laughs. “That’s kind of what it’s all about, right?”