Silver Reeds puts her romantic cards on the table with her bittersweet breakup single Tarot — premiering exclusively on Tinnitist.
Skillfully blending the classic sound of ’60s girl-group pop with contemporary production and lyrics reminiscent of Neko Case and New Pornographers, the debut single from Toronto folk-rock singer-songwriter Sandra Zelazny — aka Silver Reeds — offers a lighthearted look at the myriad ways of coping with a busted romance. As the track builds from a solo guitar and a slapback-echoed vocal to a wall of sound fashioned from heartbeat-thump drums, charmingly twinkly piano, shimmery lap steel and backup singers who coo and hum, Zelazny whimsically works her way through her litany of romantic recovery options like a post-modern 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover:
“I got over you with tarot
And I got over you with palmistry …
I got over you with whiskey
And I got over you with LSD…
I was feeling like the hanged man
Someone hanging me by my feet
Coulda been a high priestess
But there was nothing in the cards for me.”
But even if she’s unlucky in love, Zelazny is clearly holding a winning hand in the music game. Like many others who live in Toronto, she hails from somewhere else. She grew up on the East Coast, learning classical piano and teaching herself to play the guitar. She studied piano performance before moving to the sciences, and took a hard left into jewellery and metal arts at NBCCD before moving to Toronto a decade ago.
Between stints as a goldsmith, Zelazny has lived many musical lives, popping up at various open mics with a guitar and a voice, and filling spaces in funky rock and punk bands as a passable drummer, trying to avoid the spotlight. Throughout everything, she continued with a lifelong passion for crafting songs. Emotive, melodically concise, and poetic, the songs easily capture the attention and the heart of the listener, with a refreshingly honest edge of rawness, wit and strangeness.
“I’ve always admired a well-written song,” she says. “A well-written song is pure magic. It holds the power to make us feel that we are not alone, no matter how strange. Music, like all forms of art, contains seeds of empathy that can strengthen us and bond us with one another in the present, and make us feel more connected to the past. It helps us to feel part of a whole, and I believe that there are few things that are more important than fostering that connection. Music is what does that for me, and I hope to create songs that speak to others in a way that is valuable.
“In my music, I do my best to be honest. Over the course of my life, the one thing that has consistently remained a source of comfort and an antidote to loneliness has been the music that I have listened to and fallen in love with. I’m immensely grateful for that. My main goal in creating music is to contribute back into that endless well of art that we can all drink from when we need to.”
Silver Reeds’ upcoming debut album What To Leave Behind is the culmination of Zelazny’s songwriting up until now. It is a collection of 10 songs, distilled into focus with the help and skills of producer and multi-instrumentalist James Bunton (Donovan Woods, Celeigh Cardinal) and recorded at Union Sound Company Studio B.
Check out Tarot above and follow Silver Reeds on Facebook and Instagram.
