|
Christian Singer Plays at Church Christian songstress Carolyn Arends will "have a conversation" with her audience when she performs at Lambrick Park Church in Saanich this weekend. This Vancouver-based singer has raised more than a few eyebrows over her decade-long career that includes nine albums and two books. Fifteen of her songs have become top 10 radio singles on the Canadian pop and U.S. Christian charts, and she has earned two Dove awards and two Juno nominations. She's even been credited as "one of the most affecting communicators in any genre" by Billboard Magazine. Regardless of the commercial success, the highlights of her career are much more personal. Her most memorable moment was back in the mid-90s, when she was performing songs from her first album. She launched into "Seize The Day" from her 1995 release I Can Hear You and the audience spontaneously started to sing along. "That still blows me away," Arends said modestly during a telephone interview from her Lower Mainland home. "That stuff I wrote because I couldn't help myself has become a small part of who those people are." She likes to communicate with an audience, rather than just perform. "I aspire to be first and foremost a communicator. Of all the different things involved, that's closest to my heart." On Saturday evening she'll communicate - through songs and speech - with the audience at Lambrick Park Church, a venue she played when her first album was released. "I've had a chance to play some big arenas and festivals and I've also done the coffee house circuit," she said. "Whatever the venue, I try to make it into a back porch or a living room." At Lambrick Church, Arends will sing as she plays her guitar and a bit of piano to the accompaniment of Spencer Capier on violin, mandolin and bouzouki. The concert will celebrate the release of Pollyanna's Attic, Arends's ninth album, which is promoted as "an unvarnished, passionate set of soul-searching, hearth-wrenching organic pop songs." While the bulk of Arends's work is relentlessly hopeful and optimistic, Pollyanna's Attic is a bit darker and edgier than her previous material. For previous albums, she wrote a few songs that didn't quite fit. The idea of Pollyanna's Attic was to compile those darker songs into one album. "It's still about hope, but about hope that shows up in our brokenness," she said. One of the new album's themes is the importance of community and how people are not meant to live like lone wolves - a sentiment expressed in her song, "No Trespassing." Since the album was released last Tuesday, she has already received feedback. "People are telling me that even when I'm being dark, I'm not all that dark," she said. Like her other albums, Pollyanna's Attic is deeply grounded in the idea that there is a God who wants people to know he's there. "My faith is so foundational to how I see the world," she said. "I think God is alive and is making himself known to us in everything that happens." Also like in her other albums, her new songs are very personal. "One of the big themes that keeps coming up for me is this idea that everything that happens to us is really important." She attempts to pay attention to her life and things going on around her, then writes about it. Her eight-year-old son and four-year-old daughter have been an enormous source of inspiration, particularly with respect to her 2002 release We've Been Waiting For You. However, being an entertainer and a mother has its challenges. Before motherhood, Arends was on the road for months at a time, but now she leaves the nest about every other weekend. Her performance this weekend at Lambrick Park Church, 1780 Feltham Rd., takes place Saturday at 7:30 p.m. |