Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
It flew out of Christine Fellows’ own mouth. We would never, ever say or even imply such a thing. It would be rude and ghastly.

“I’m an old, old woman,” the 38-year-old songwriter said a few weeks ago from Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, the morning after she’s just opened a show for The Mountain Goats in a theater there.

Of she and friend Shary Boyle, another Canadian artist who’s currently on tour with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, she said, “We’re just kind of two arty ladies up in Canada.”

A description like this contains a level of modesty that you wouldn’t get from an American. Donald Trump would not say, “I’m just a business man?” Jack Black couldn’t bite his tongue enough to mildly explain, “I’m just a guy who acts when he’s not messing around playing his guitar?” This is nearly what Fellows is doing. She’s just another person, focused on making the kind of art she has a passion for making and sometimes a bright piece of luck falls out of the sky and into her hands. Sometimes she’s able to pursue her passion on her country’s dollar. Over the summer, this humble arty woman used a $20,000 grant from the Canadian goverment to tour the country with her band. Someone in the Harper cabinet thinks she’s a pretty special person, much more special that she gives herself credit for.

“I’d be waitressing here, for sure,” Fellows suggested if she lived in the U.S.

The work Fellows did on “Paper Anniversary”—out on Six Shooter Records Nov. 14—is playful, but not fanciful. It’s the work of a woman who’s spent quality time with language and an endless array of stimuluses. She’s blessed with her life’s experiences and the seasoning that they bring her, allowing her to give off the same kind of feeling that Aimee Mann did with her “Magnolia” soundtrack work, though with less bleakness thrown directly out for the taking. She’s quirky, which comes off in this case as the most refreshing form of eccentricity, not as the puckered up lost causes of a mad scientist, as some quirkiness does. You know the kind. Listening, there’s a feeling that if it could speak, not just sing and rule, this record—through Fellows—would say, “Do as I say, not as I do. On second thought, what the fuck do I really know? Life’s a real scrambler, wouldn’t you say?”

The title track for the record contains two choruses that address the passage of time in a way that we’re all familiar with—where there’s no difference from the past to the present to the future. Or if there is, it’s subtle. She sings, “What did we learn from the first time?/What did we learn?/There’s a first time/A worst time/For everything…/And what did we learn from the second time?/What did we learn?/There’s no better time that the second time of anything with you.” It’s a chipper way to look at a first anniversary—putting on expensive shoes, drinking shitty champagne and saying what you really mean.

“I’m on about the ninth of 10th times of things. You just keep going around,” Fellows said of the message of the song. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that you learn with the second time. You just keep going around the block.

“I can’t remember who wrote it, but I remember reading something that said, ‘We were put on this earth to learn the same things over and over again.’ I’m happy to learn the same things over and over.”

The album was recorded in Fellows’ old, falling down house, with an old piano. The writing and recording process became her day-to-day routine for many months.

“I always wanted to make a record there,” she said. “When I was done, it was almost like it didn’t happen.”

This kind of ghost quality can be heard in the record. The ideas feel flushed out and naked all in one breath. There are ghostly breezes in her songs and then she works on personifying monsters when she’s not working on her own material in Winnipeg. A Manitoba man shot some footage of sasquatch last year. In Canada, the existence of Bigfoot is not questioned or doubted as much as it is here, where hoaxes and pessimism has squashed the plausibility of the idea. Fellows, whose husband is Weakerthans lead singer John K. Samson, and her drummer are creating the score to the film.

“It’s a hilarious and sad documentary,” she said.

A similar statement could be made about “Paper Anniversary.”

Christine Fellows
Six Shooter Records