This came out in 2005 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Christine Fellows has never given me a gift.
But if she did, I imagine it wouldn’t be something she went out and bought at a store. I like to think it would be something homemade. Probably something artsy. And it would likely be assembled from odds ’n’ ends she had around the house: Old family photos, pages out of a diary she found in the attic, a few feathers that drifted in the window one day, some leaves she had pressed inside a book. You know, the sort of stuff that — if you or I tried to make something out of it — would look like some pathetic summer-camp art project. But somehow, Fellows would take all that what-have-you and weave it together so artfully that you could not help but be struck by both the simple beauty and the tremendous skill on display.
At least, that’s the feeling I always get listening to her songs. Especially the songs on Paper Anniversary. It’s the Winnipeg singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s third full-length and easily her finest, with 14 tracks of sublimely natural elegance and inspired craftsmanship that are as intimate as love letters, as literate as short stories, as poised as poetry, as homespun and unique as birds’ nests. Produced by Fellows and recorded mostly at her Osborne Village home, each of these songs creates and briefly inhabits its own tiny, fragile world, like the inside of a snowglobe that will break apart if you shake it too hard.
The basic building blocks are simple: Fellows’ honest and unadorned vocals; her delicate yet insistent touch on the keyboard; her ability to conjure up a forlorn melody that sounds familiar even as you hear it for the first time; and her hauntingly poetic lyrics. Let’s start with those lyrics. Sometimes they’re deadly serious (“Time of death / I failed you once”). Sometimes they’re darkly humourous (“We met in the emergency ward / Getting our stomachs pumped”). Sometimes they’re light and just plain silly (“We put clothespins in our hair and tissues in our sleeves”). But usually they’re nostalgic and melancholy and surreal. And always, they’re strangely evocative, somewhere between distant memories, misheard wishes and half-recalled utterances floating up out of the subconscious.
Adorned with only the merest of instrumental accompaniment, they would still hook you and draw you into Fellows’ dreamlike world. But she doesn’t stop there. She surrounds her stories with a rich palette of sounds, styles, moods and textures — from rootsy banjos to classical cellos, vibraphone tinkles to dusty swooshes, electronic loops to nature recordings. Most of it she does herself. Some of it is played by a short guest list that includes The Weakerthans’ Jason Tait and John K. Samson. But it doesn’t matter who does what; what matters is how Fellows expertly mixes it all together into an ear-catching yet tastefully restrained soundscape. Not one moment, not one note on this disc is filler or forgettable. Every tiny element — even the most subtle one-word background vocal or the most peripheral echo — is a part of the whole, like a jigsaw piece of blue sky and cloud that fits seamlessly into the corner of a puzzle. Eventually, all those pieces merge into a uniquely framed, magnificently rendered whole.
And it’s then I realized that Fellows has given me — and all of us — a gift after all.
