Paula Perri @ Drake Underground

. : : May 10th, 2012 : : .

I regret that this Paula Perri recording hasn’t seen the light of day in almost a decade.

It was recorded May of 2012, in a busy mid-month week packed with a handful of other Hater-High favourites (including Rocky Votolato and Amelia Curran), opening for Pearl and the Beard at what is in my estimation the best sounding venue in town: the Drake Underground.

But as a sapling among the tall trees, this tape was left to dry out. It was EQ’d and tracked, but abandoned somewhere between encoding to FLAC and creating a text file.

Listening back now, I’m glad I didn’t put it out as it was. The original EQ pass I did was thin, brittle, and doesn’t do Paula’s performance justice. This new version is more balanced, with the bottom-end brought up significantly to balance out the lack of bass in the performance.

Unfortunately, I’m a day late and a buck short. In the nine years that have passed, Paula transitioned from a promising performing career with an ardent fan base to a booking manager, event programmer, promoter, professor and VP of an event planning firm.

Since then, her music seems to have been scrubbed from Google — there’s a rare YouTube video and handfuls of photographs of her performances, but details of her actual recorded output are all but non-existent.

According to a great article I found archived online by Lauren Smolen (available here), Paula was talented enough for a FACTOR grand, a private, non-profit organization that funds small Canadian musicians’ projects, from albums to music videos to touring expenses. The subsequent demo was, presumably, the album being hawked at the performance in question, but further details on it are pretty much non-existent. Last.FM indicates it may have been called “You’ll Find Me Here.”

It stands to reason, then, that this recording will be the sole digital-audio testament that Paula Perri was a Canadian performer of some repute, having won over her peers at King’s University/Western and concert-going audiences of stages across southern Ontario.

I hope those fans are able to find their way to this recording, and I hope it does their memories justice.

1. [banter]
2. [unknown]
3. Broken Arrow
4. [banter]
5. [unknown]
6. [banter]
7. Gorgeous Storm
8. [banter]
9. Heartbeats [the Knife]
10. [banter]
11. We Go
12. [banter]
13. [unknown]
14. [banter]
15. If I Grow Old

[info.txt // FLAC Fingerprint] [ Request FLAC or MP3 Download

• The Drake Underground