Spotlight: Evan J. Cartwright On Being Called “Post-Modern Chet Baker” and His Debut Album 'bit by bit'
“POST-MODERN CHET BAKER” IS THE DESCRIPTOR GIVEN — to 30-year-old Evan J. Cartwright. An artist at heart, Cartwright has been making music since the sixth grade and has found a successful career as the go-to drummer and collaborator for groups like The Weather Station, U.S. Girls, and Brodie West. He is no secret to the music industry, but for the first time ever, Cartwright is releasing a self-produced, full-length album titled bit by bit. Out today, the album’s contemporary composition artfully combines jazz melodicism and contemplative lyricism, which is evident both through singing and spoken word poetry. The album’s stripped-back eclectic sound often mixes trumpet-like phrasing with field recordings of bells and birdsong, making for an experience that leaves you drifting inside each song. In a world of its own, bit by bit is an often necessary reminder that music is art.
As an artist, who better to be compared to than one of the musical greats, Chet Baker. “I wasn’t the one to say that!” Cartwright says with a laugh at the comparison. He clarified that he owes much of his melodic sensibility to jazz horn players, Chet Baker included, but also Lester Young and other artists in that School of Jazz.
“It somehow resonates,” Cartwright explains of his connection to Baker. “I feel like he and I are kind of that soft tenor in range. But then he wasn't just a singer — he had his trumpet. And with my music, I mean, it's kind of silly. I didn't really play any drums on this record, but I feel like my musical voice is not entirely contained to my singing voice.” Cartwright has multiple instruments to express his musical sound, including, voice, drums, keyboard, and guitar.
Music is something Cartwright has known for years he wanted to do. Growing up in Toronto, he went to a performing arts high school and went on to attend the University of Toronto, where he studied music for jazz drumming.
But his general musical interest began far before that. “I’ve always been writing music — from probably about grade nine.” So when it came to taking the leap from collaboration to working on his own album, Cartwright explains that it never felt like that much of a stretch. “I don't know if it was as much of a branching out as just taking a bit of extra time to do something that was less collaborative.”
Eventually, as Cartwright continued to write on the side, he scraped together enough songs that he was proud of for this first release, which is fittingly titled bit by bit.
The name of the album itself came to Cartwright in a moment he can’t exactly recall, but he liked that it suited a theme that a lot of the songs had in common lyrically. Many of Cartwright’s songs are about the space or time between two people.
“That space is always made up of little bits of space,” he describes. “Time always happens in these little bits — you can get from point A to point B, but it just happens bit by bit.”
Music, in general, can take time to make: the work coming together bit by bit, Cartwright’s eight-year-in-the-making album is a testament to that, but one song on his album was a little different.
“You know, sometimes when you’re working on a record and one segment will take forever, it takes you forever to get all the pieces together and record everything,” Cartwright begins. “I was just in the kitchen with my roommates — I think I was just doing dishes — and for some reason, I wanted to hear something that I had recorded for a different project — like a very different project — just something that I had demoed on guitar. For whatever reason, I just thought, ‘Oh, rather than just listening to one take and then the other, I'll just listen to both overtop of each other.’” To Cartwright’s surprise, he liked it, and that became the beginning of the artist’s second to last song on the album: “impossibly blue.”
“Somehow, I just came up with the rest of it very quickly,” he says. “That was my favorite moment: just from the beginning to the end of recording that song.”
Cartwright’s goal with his musical arrangements is to collage and piece things together as he does in “impossibly blue.” But, lyrically, it’s the total opposite. “I think, with lyrics, I'm kind of trying to get out of this with what I'm writing now, but I've always tried to just be very succinct, very neat,” Cartwright explains. “Everything should just be really contained, and there should be a very clear little turn towards the end … that what the song is quote-unquote about should be very clear.”
Cartwright determines this to be his writing style, but with a lot on his plate this year — collaborating with new groups, doing shows for his release, and always writing Cartwright — this too might change. Time changes a lot of things, bit by bit.
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