Take Sarah Harmer. With her perenially under-recognized band Weeping Tile, a quartet whose sound verges more towards the rough, moody guitar rock of the Tragically Hip or Son Volt than, say, Joni Mitchell, she quietly kicked out one of 1997's finest albums, Valentino. She then saw it undeservedly swamped amid a gentle tide of Jewels and Sarah McLachlans and Loreena McKennitts.
Fortunately, Ottawa gets another opportunity to catch up with one of Canada's unsung national treasures when Kingston's hard-touring Tile (accompanied by fellow prison-town faves The Hellbillys) returns to Barrymore's this Friday night.
Today, Harmer -- fresh off an East Coast swing with Holly McNarland's band -- is calling in from an Irving Big Stop somewhere along a forlorn stretch of New Brunswick highway.
"We just had a good time," she says of the road trip. "We rocked pretty hard, we made some DAT tapes on the way. We're feelin' pretty good."
Weeping Tile is on its way to New York City for an acoustic gallery gig with an eye, Harmer explains, to "getting something going as far as a regular kind of residency" in the Big Apple. It's the band's latest, low-key attempt to break into the U.S., where Valentino has yet to be released. (Cold Snap, its fine first album, scored a U.S. release but sank from view when its American label, the Atlantic subsidiary Tag, got "folded back into the mother ship.")
"It's so big down there you've just got to crack at it slowly," says Harmer, who admits she doesn't place enormous importance on success south of the border. "I mean, we've got ambition. We want to share our music with everyone we can.
"You ultimately want to expand and hit other places, be it America or Germany ... It's a big world, man."
In that spirit, Harmer and guitarist Luther Wright head to Australia shortly for the double duty of attending a friend's wedding and playing a few acoustic shows Down Under. The present consists of "pretty much playing and writing songs and reading really good books.
"I feel the gestation period pretty strongly right now," says Harmer. "There's a lot of ideas I've been tossing around in my head for a while."
She may also have a burgeoning career as a video star. Harmer comes soon to a TV screen near you in the video for her duet with the Skydiggers, Dear Henry. And Weeping Tile just completed a clip for Can't Get Off, the new Valentino single, which she describes as "part glammy, part fun and homey."
"We were in this weird room, kind of pink-ish," she says. "It looked like a slaughterhouse, actually. But it looks kind of romantic on the screen."
