Gabrielle Shonk’s ‘Across The Room’: How do you come back to yourself? First, it’s important to understand you have become lost, and admit you’ve veered off path. How then do you begin to piece yourself back together? This is the journey Gabrielle Shonk, the JUNO Award-nominated singer and songwriter, takes us on with her sophomore album, Across The Room.
The eleven-track record chronicles the big and small feelings of heartache, and the hope that comes with endings and new beginnings. This excavation of self and purpose seemed to be a long time coming. “It's not always the easiest to look inward. But, when it is easy, you hold on to all those small victories— finding a sense of wholeness within yourself.” Every track on Across The Room began as a feeling. Each was the seed of something Shonk noted down and stashed away for later, once she had felt what she needed and could reasonably tackle such subject matter later on. Because the process of moving on begins with coming to terms with a feeling before understanding what really happened. Clarity always comes later.
And that’s the throughline of this sublime sophomore offering. Across The Room, a deeply personal and lucid record, is the result of years of feeling, thinking, and breathing life back into a creative spirit.
Sarah Harmer’s ‘Are You Gone’: Multi-award-winning, platinum-selling singer-songwriter and environmental activist Sarah Harmer released Are You Gone, her first album in a decade, on February 21st, 2020. A deeply personal and political collection of songs motivated by the beauty of life, the urgency of the climate crisis, and the question of loss, Sarah called the album a spiritual successor of sorts to her acclaimed 2000 debut, You Were Here, which made many year-end critics’ lists, and which TIME called the year’s best debut album. Its simple title, Are You Gone, is a meditation on the idea of presence, and a bookend to the questions posed on You Were Here - a sharpened, more electric confrontation with the realities of nature and human nature.
