Monique Barry keeps her eye on the hourglass and her talents in music’s time zone with her latest single

Time, as Tennessee Williams wisely told us, is the longest distance between two places—a perspective that singer-songwriter Monique Barry is more than prepared to support—and sing about. Always a musical innovator and a tuneful risk taker, Monique has often been ahead of her time, and shows no sign of falling behind. Ever since starting her musical career, she hasn’t just spent time—she’s also invested it in the evolution of her creative vision, as well as the exploration of her musical scope and diversity.

Monique’s newest single, Time, is the eighth and latest in a series of singles that’s slated to culminate in a completed album entitled HAAK.

A delicately atmospheric exploration of loss and connection, Time begins with a quiet, ghostly flair and a spellbinding background laced with breathy, faraway sighs (of someone who’s been running a great distance, it suggests, toward something…or away from it?) “Hope to see past your distance, it's dark and it's blue” she sings, gently reaching vocally through a caressing multilayered soundscape.

Also going the musical distance on Time are some of Monique’s most trusted and vibrant collaborators: Kevin Lacroix on guitar, Alisdair Jones on bass, Emma Campbell on vocals and Michael Philip Wojewoda on drums, vocals,  mix and co-production.

HAAK

Time

Time Monique Barry

Lake Shanty is an intimate, musical encapsulation of my love and devotion to cold water swimming.

Lake Shanty

Lake Shanty Monique Barry

A shimmering, sweeping meditation on transition and independence, Open Road features counterpointing musical textures, soaring harmonies, and many reflections on experience, insight, gain, and loss. Monique’s beguiling vocals act as both the song’s anchor and axis, with captivating results. Gentle and uplifting, Open Road can stand with the best of her songwriting output.

As well as providing Monique with a new musical drama to explore and vocalize, Open Road features the participation and inspiration of Marc Meriläinen (guitar), Alisdair Jones (bass), Terrence O’Brien aka Anomalous Disturbances (ambient sonics), Emma Campbell (vocals), and Michael Wojewoda (mixing/drums).

Lyrics
Open Road
Bags all packed and standing ready
Waiting 'til the house is sleeping to
Open wide and climb outside
Creep away with every feeling
Thumping head and hands are shaking as they
Close the door, gas to the floor

Chours:
We've taken, taken to the open road
To find, to find the way on our own
A clear high dive, no thoughts to hide
We've taken, taken to the open road
To find, to find the way on our own
A clear high dive, fully alive

Flash of light flies off the payment
Sun shines high upon our shoulders softly
Touching held in a loving spell
Freedom seeps into our fiber
Length of road we've left behind us make us
Hard to find for those we've left behind

Chorus


Open Road

Open Road (Radio Edit)

Freedom is a song with a mystery in its soul: the nature of freedom itself and how we see it. Addressing the struggle we have with others and ourselves, the song raises questions on the themes of liberation and love. Are we asking to be embraced? Or held hostage? Do we choose freedom this time or discard it for something safe and imprisoning? 

Monique’s musical technique continues to spark, startle, and, best of all, intrigue. As the single progresses, her vocals take on extra colour, reach, and energy, as well as a searching sense that is one of her signature qualities. Ominous drum beats provide a ritualistic pull as her chanting and emoting combine rock dramatics with torch song vulnerability. The chorus of ascending and descending repetitions of the word freedom might be suggesting that independence is a boundless necessity…or perhaps a drop into one’s personal abyss? Bringing a fine, rough glint to the mix, the metallic gauziness of the guitars creates a hybrid of folk rock and punk while the accompanying bass surge suggests the isolation and longing that puts freedom and abandonment in the same emotional territory.

Freedom

Interview with Marc Merilainen discussing new album, the process, the touring, the fun and fumbles of it all.

Monique Barry Interview April 13 from The Marc Show

Uplifting in every level of performance, High as a Kite, like the other singles in this enticing song-by-song release, explores the highs and lows, the calming affinities, and the crazy progressions on the journey through experience. Advancing steadily and seductively to the pulse of acoustic and electronic drums, this bewitching new song takes an aerial but intimate view of the contrasts and contradictions of love, the multi-sided nature of affection, and the shared realities within human involvement. “Look into my eyes,” Monique sings beckoningly, inviting discovery and confrontation in her creative search through space and time. As the song builds, the flow of voice and music evolves into a billowing curtain of sound, spirit, rhythm, and atmosphere. Soothing keyboards join forces with weaving guitar licks, capturing a timeless, perfect moment of knowledge and contact within an uncertain world. Addressing realities belonging to all ages and levels of involvement, High as a Kite uses lyrics, music, tempo, and ambient soundscaping to capture and acclaim the recognition that comes with emotional awakenings.

High As A Kite

Following the thematic thrust of the earlier singles, New Eyes adds its own rushing narrative to the album’s ongoing exploration of the journey from innocence into experience—in this case a long, struggling moment where “where joy and pain peacefully unite.” In this fourth piece of the evolving album’s soundscaping portrait, we’re given a glimpse of a world recently discovered and seen with new emotional jeopardy and excitement. Pure love leads to pure pain—and where pleasure is absolute, so is the accompanying suffering.
Rich with rhythm, entrancing flourishes, and ominous emotional signals, New Eyes is Monique’s riveting take on Krautrock. Like a dance of love ripping through a burning building, the new single is ambient but aggressive, experimental yet traditional. Riding on a rhythm that throbs, smacks, and strums all at the same time, New Eyes combines the pounding nocturnal attack of Marianne Faithfull’s time-honoured Broken English with the wide-eyed curiosity and bravado of a contemporary Lene Lovich. As spidery hooks creep in, cloudy fuzztone dynamism gathers and  mushrooms, and Monique’s searching vocals reach through the music, catching shards of her soul, and ours too. This latest offering from Monique Barry takes the disco-punk dynamic by the throat and hurls it into a dance club inferno.
As well as providing Monique with a new recorded drama to explore and inhabit, New Eyes thrives and soars thanks to the participating artistry and inspiration of Marc Meriläinen (guitar), Alisdair Jones (bass), and Michael Wojewoda (mixing/drums).

New Eyes

New Eyes Radio Edit

Dance, it is said, is the hidden language of the soul, but Monique Barry has given it a new linguistic identity by becoming the voice of dance itself. It all happens in her newest single, which, appropriately enough, is called 'Dance'. It's the fifth and latest in a series of singles by Monique that's slated to culminate in a completed album entitled HAAK. 

From single to single, Monique has been exploring the journey from innocence into experience, building on the theme with each song. She enters this new chapter of her musical search by singing in a soothing foxtrot lilt, with the vocal narrative set in a dance club where her protagonist goes to escape a failing romance. There the atmosphere of comfortable chaos with “no cares at all” is highlighted by crisp percussion, music box twinkling (played on a celeste and serving as the voice of disco mirror balls), and synthesizer tones that hover and soar. Gradually as the hunger for escape evolves into a search for order and safety, Monique lifts the lyrics to the next level with her moody, waltzing delivery, and the music gathers into a whirling cloud of sound, suggesting both safety and release, shadow and light. 

Hailed for her “hypnotic mystique” (eye magazine) and “dynamic vocal range” (The Independent Weekly), Monique Barry has consistently demonstrated a willingness to experiment with musical forms and the aesthetic knowhow to back up her creative instincts. Her previous albums—Moody (1998), Tripping (2003), Carbon (2009), and Wake (2013)—have established a critically appreciated affinity for musical dynamism and innovation. Always drawing on a wide range of experiential and cultural influences, Monique’s inspiration for 'Dance' evolved from a section of Joseph Boyden’s novel Through Black Spruce in which a DJ plays mainstream dance music with native rhythms mixed in as a way of communicating. 

Also making musical waves on 'Dance' are some of Monique’s most trusted and vibrant collaborators: Marc Merilainen on guitar, Alisdair Jones on bass, Emma Campbell on vocals and  Michael Philip Wojewoda, co-producer, drums and mix.

Dance

Monique Barry Finds the Dual Nature of the Musical Single

Good things come in pairs, the saying goes. Never one to do the expected, singer-songwriter Monique Barry gives us her musical take on this notion by releasing two new songs as one single.

The dual release begins with Gone, Monique’s exploration of emotional loss and betrayal experienced for the first time. “It’s cold since you are gone,” she sings, her lyrics gently rising through an otherworldly soundscape as she describes the disillusionment when a beloved figure is finally seen with all flaws and failings revealed. As she confronts the journey from idealistic loyalty to emotional defeat, she sings of being “lost in freedom’s arms,” a description that might apply to both the betrayer and herself, but with entirely different meanings. While the song progresses, her voice, floating through echoing instrumental layers, takes on the blending qualities of wounded chanting and a faraway adult lullaby.

Searching through the journey from idealism to disappointment, Monique takes the themes and emotional dynamics of 'Gone' into the musical hooks and catchy sonic quirks of the second single 'Eagles'. Starting with the multi-atmospheric weave of instrumental rustlings, vibrations, and nudging drumbeats, Monique’s voice soars above it all, taking its own form of flight. Musical ripples, splinters, and crashes, all of it both jittery and relaxing, build as Monique’s singing ascends in pitch, becoming airborne and birdlike, taking the listener along on her creative search of freedom and defeat.

Ultimately the two songs flow into each other, both thematically and musically, each leading the other into a unified vision. While providing vocals and performing on keyboards, Monique is joined by Michael Wojewoda on drums, as well as coproducing and mixing; Marc Merilainen on guitar; and Alisdair Jones on bass.

Gone + Eagles

The number seven has long been associated with good luck and magical forces. But in the case of singer-songwriter Monique Barry, there's a great deal more to both that particular number and her musical output than just fortune's favour and a bit of enchantment. Her latest song, “Coyote”, is the seventh single in a series of innovative and highly individual releases that will add up to a finished album titled HAAK. And as the song climbs through its narrative peaks and varying stylistic passages it very quickly becomes apparent that “Coyote” is the result of vision and skill rather than mere luck, and the magic here can be found in Monique's creative focus and the inspiration she draws from the natural world and our interaction with it.  

Never one to resort to the expected, Monique has always been quick to discover her creative influences and thematic material in a variety of contrasting sources. Her new single began to take form when it was reported that a coyote had been seen in Toronto in her own neighborhood, leading to a set of lyrics addressing the troubling dynamic of mutual invasion: namely, the animal's encroachment on urban settings which has been brought about by man's destruction of wildlife habitats. Both confrontation and avoidance are part of the conflicting forces that Monique explores here as she depicts the response of urban humanity to the presence of the canine outsider. Rather than confront the significance of the animal's presence, the action taken by the local citizens is to record the novelty of the coyote's image on cell phones—capturing the animal, in a sense, in a secondary new and artificial environment. Further to this, “Coyote” also comments on how we confuse the meaning and impact of what's being stored on our electronic devices. In this collision between man and beast, entrapment claims both the intruder (who is forced to live in an alien surrounding not suited to it) and the human inhabitants (who can't interact with the animal and must monitor its activities from a distance within the safety of indoors). 

Driving Monique's latest single is a rich electroacoustic mix of guitarwork that artfully writhes and ripples as it floats through the song; crisp, cracking percussion; soaring keyboards; and a musical atmosphere that carries the lyrics into a very private but beckoning environment all its own. Joining Monique on “Coyote” are some of her most trusted and vibrant collaborators: Kevin Lacroix on electric guitar; Alisdair Jones on bass guitar and synth bass; Michael Wojewoda on drums and vocals; and Emma Campbell, also on vocals. As well as giving us the lead voicework, Monique also plays Native Instruments ‘Noire’ piano with particle engine.

Coyote

Thanks for stopping by! I'm working on my 5th album, HAAK.  Releasing it single by single in the order the songs will appear on the finished product.  Would love you to follow along on the journey.

Monique Barry

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