Popular music is a history of singing of what’s on one’s mind. Love, loss, lust and longing — a band and their leader making a commotion about the feeling in the air, the rustle in their leaves. Rare then to sing in retrospect. Rare to look back and remember and record the commotion anew. But that’s what THE GARDEN is: a STRINGS ALBUM and a RETROSPECTIVE from a room in Montreal with the windows open, and the wind moving, and the leaves changing, and a spring-coloured secret on the tip of Basia Bulat’s tongue.
Bulat performs throughout, finding new feelings for old lines. Distance teaches; distance reveals things. “I sing the songs differently now,” she says. “It’s the gift of time.” Not just that: at the time of recording, Bulat had just found out she was expecting her first child. (Her daughter was born in April 2021.)