Tanya Davis

Artist Information

Biography

"The level of honesty in her lyrics was charming, shocking and hilarious but in no way undermined the adventurous dexterity of her beautiful guitar playing." (Exclaim!)

Tanya Davis is a poet. She is a storyteller. She is a musician and a singer-songwriter and she fuses these elements together in a refreshing matrimony of language and sound, side-stepping genre and captivating audiences in the process. With the release of her third album, Clocks and Hearts Keep Going in November 2010, she affirms her well-earned place in the ranks of creative and hard-working Canadian Artists.

Since bursting onto the Halifax music scene in 2006 with her debut album, Make a List, Tanya has garnered praise from industry, audience, and peers, as well as multiple award nominations, including one for her sophomore release, Gorgeous Morning, for the 2009 ECMA Female Recording of the Year. She is a 2 time winner in the CBC National Poetry Face-off as well as the Canadian Winner of the 2008 Mountain Stage NewSong contest. In 2009, with support from Bravo, she collaborated with independent filmmaker Andrea Dorfman to produce a short videopoem entitled How to Be Alone; the short has since been featured at numerous film festivals, including The Worldwide Short Film Festival Zebra Videopoem Festival (Berlin). It has also travelled the world on youtube, with more than 2.5 million views.

As a multi-disciplinary artist, Tanya has made forays into diverse communities, attracting eclectic yet complementary supporters in the process. No matter the project or the stage, Tanya's candid expression, her startling creativity, and her heartfelt and obvious love of performing continue to endear her to new and faithful audiences.

Clocks and Hearts was produced in collaboration with celebrated Canadian Artist Jim Bryson. This album, like those before it, will feature strongly her unique and vulnerable style, full of poignant lyrics, catchy melodies, and expressive, if unconventional, arrangements. She is also currently at work on a feature-length show based in music and performance poetry, as funded by The Canada Council for the Arts.

Instrumentation

Tanya Davis - electric guitar, bass, vocals, poetry
Timothy Crabtree - bass, keys, aux. percussion, vocals
Benn Ross/Rich Knox - drums and percussion

Discography

Tanya Davis - Clocks and Hearts Keep Going (Wordy Music/Saved by Vinyl, Nov 2010)
Tanya Davis - Gorgeous Morning (wordy music, June 2008)
Tanya Davis - Make a List (April 2006)

Links

• MySpace
• Facebook
• Twitter

Audio

• dont bury me
  Listen  
• one room
  Listen  
• Gorgeous Morning
  Listen  
• Art
  Listen  
• Fortress
  Listen  
• Trusy Umbrella
  Listen  
• The Drums
  Listen  
• Firebug
  Listen  
• The River Runs
  Listen  
• Do More
  Listen  
• Please Bless
  Listen  
• Don't Bury Me
  Listen  
• One Room
  Listen  
• Mourn Your Losses
  Listen  
• Tra-la-la
  Listen  
• Eulogy for You and Me
  Listen  
• Sad Secret
  Listen  
• Don't Bury Me
  Listen  
• Hush, Little Weeper
  Listen  
• One Room
  Listen  
• Sweep the Dust
  Listen  
• Fauna
  Listen  

Lyrics

• Gorgeous Morning
• Fortress
• Art
• Trusy Umbrella
• The Gorgeous Morning
• The River Runs
• Don't Bury Me

Video

Firebug - Live

Photo Gallery

Press

• chart attack review [+ Show ]
  

  Tanya Davis Moves To Halifax And Keeps On Writing Monday November 27, 2006 @ 05:00 PM By: ChartAtt...Tanya Davis Moves To Halifax And Keeps On Writing
  Monday November 27, 2006 @ 05:00 PM
  By: ChartAttack.com Staff
  
  
  Spoken word poet/performer Tanya Davis masterly cajoles language into brief, simple songs embodying universal themes such as love, loneliness, loss, infatuation and art. She's catalogued her deep pockets of syllables, synonyms, verbs, adjectives and nouns into a debut disc dubbed Make A List.
  "I've been writing since I was very little, it was the first thing I ever wanted to do when I grew up," says Davis, over morning coffee in Halifax. "Growing up on P.E.I., there wasn't a hell of a lot to do, as I'm sure like it is growing up in many small towns.
  "I think it influenced me to write a lot. There wasn't really another option."
  Nova Scotia recently adopted the burgeoning wordsmith, as the local weekly The Coast pegged her as "one of Halifax's most mesmerizing performers." In her late twenties, Davis seems to be spilling the ink from her pen anywhere and everywhere. Since her humble beginnings softly sputtering words from scraps of loose leaf at quiet cafes in Vancouver and Charlottetown, she decided to hang her literary hat in Halifax.
  "I try and write every day," says Davis. "I just moved into a new house and I can feel I'm not writing as much.
  "I didn't know anybody at first, so I just wrote. I moved here because I wanted to make music. I wrote every day. That was my work."
  Davis draws inspiration from personal experience and the surrounding world. The well-read word hound considers Anne-Marie MacDonald, Michelle Tea and Alice Walker as lettered comrades. Her musical abilities were recently recognized in Liverpool during Nova Scotia Music Week, as she was nominated for four Nova Scotia Music Awards: new artist/group, female recording, alternative recording and album of the year.
  "I'm completely honoured," says Davis. "I don't feel like I left high school deciding to be a rock star.
  "It took some time to get here. Now that I am here, it's all that I want to do. It's all that I think I'm designed for. It's my passion. I have nothing to fall back on. This is it right now. This is going to be it."
  Davis trumpets truth, as she consciously lives a cathartic, honest and genuine existence, both inside and outside of her music. She's comfortable being a visibly queer poet, person and public entity. "It's most important for me to be genuine about who I am, so I feel like I'd rather neither flaunt or hide," Davis explains.
  "It's a non-issue for me in my life. I feel like I did the young-twenty, coming out, angry feminist. I feel like a lot of women go through it, the empowering stage. I still think about gender and sexuality issues. I don't write about it as overtly anymore."
  Davis is an emotional polymath, as she combines the artful aesthetic of Ani DiFranco with the rhythmic schemes of Kinnie Starr. In the near future she hopes to record a full-length album, figure out what she should name her band and then tour. She currently plays with Don Brownrigg on keyboards, and Down With The Butterfly's Kris Pope on electric guitar and Jason Burns on drums.
  Check out Davis and her untitled band at Halifax's One World Cafe with Catherine MacLellan on Dec. 1 and at Babba's in Charlottetown with Jenn Grant on Dec. 27.
  —Shannon Webb-Campbell
  

• 'The Coast' Cover Feature [+ Show ]
  

  The evolution of Tanya Davis Though her transformation from shy coffee shop dweller to one of Halif...The evolution of Tanya Davis
  Though her transformation from shy coffee shop dweller to one of Halifax's most mesmerizing performers has been exhilarating and fast, Tanya Davis is still hard to peg. And that's how she wants it. "I've never really felt like I fit in anywhere,"
  
  
  by Shayla Howell
  
  
  
  A year ago, 26-year-old Tanya Davis had no friends to hang out with. She had just moved to Halifax from PEI to pursue a career as a poet/writer/musician, but had no connections and no album to peddle. She spent her afternoons at Steve-O-Renos writing and thinking, and her nights at live shows hoping to connect with other musicians.
  
  Six months later, Tanya Davis stood softly before an open mic at One World Cafe on Agricola Street in jeans and a baggy sweater, her long brown hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, and apologized to the audience for not having yet committed her new poem to memory. She took the mic in her right hand, and, reading from the small piece of white paper in her left, proceeded to blow the minds of the dozen or so people in the room with an intensely personal, lyrically rhythmic exploration about whether or not she needed love in her life.
  
  Six days ago, Tanya Davis was on her way to Liverpool for Nova Scotia Music Week, where she would again stand in front of a mic. This time, her thick hair cut into layers, she played in front of a packed room sporting a skirt, tall boots and a band. This time, she also stood to win awards in four categories, including New Artist/Group of the Year, and for her debut CD, Make a List, Female Recording of the Year, Alternative Recording of the Year and finally, the coveted Album of the Year. Ultimately, she would be beat out in all categories, but the mere nominations served as a loud announcent of her arrival.
  
  So who is Tanya Davis? As a practitioner in the spoken word genre, and a very new musician to the Halifax scene, it's not surprising that most people don't know of her. Also not surprising is that, likely, they soon will.
  
  
  "Her lyrics are of a mature songwriter," says Gordon Lapp, the executive director of Music Nova Scotia. "Her messaging is incredible for someone that young. She's got the attention of a lot of people. She's turning heads."
  
  Lapp describes Davis' sound as "Leonard Cohen meets Sarah Harmer" which is apt, referencing her melding of the singer-songwriter and poetry genres. But she sounds like neither. In fact, it's almost impossible to point to a known artist whose sound is comparable. Six of the nine songs on her CD, Make a List, are mostly spoken word enhanced by musical accompaniment (Davis plays guitar, ukele and bass on the album). The other three tracks are folk songs with Davis singing throughout, ranging in tone from wistful ("Potato") to playful ("The Drums") to thoughtful ("Something").
  
  Her voice is soft and velvety with a slightly gauzy texture. She enunciates her consonants and one can almost hear a lilt, likely her PEI heritage. The track "Sometimes" offers nuances of Dolores O'Riordan Burton from The Cranberries. No, Tanya Davis is not a Sarah Harmer wannabe. Nor Sarah McLachlan, or any other girl-with-guitar artist you can name.
  
  "She has a delicate strength to her voice, like Feist, or Gillian Welch," says Davis' keyboardist, Don Brownrigg, "but there's no one really like her."
  
  Davis is making a name for herself as a poet and a writer, and for that she's pleased. But it's not enough. She wants to put out pop songs as well. If that sounds random, it isn't. She's hard to pin down on purpose.
  
  "I've never really felt like I fit in anywhere," she says. "I don't want to be just known as a poet, or as a girl who plays guitar." On her MySpace blog, she writes, "I want to have a group of people on stage with me…and we can rock people's socks off. or, maybe we can folk people's socks of, or pop them off, or indie them off…you see where I'm going with this: it's hard to define what kind of music I play...but I'm even happier to play music AND do poetry." She goes on to explain how excited she is to "introduce unsuspecting haligonians to another style of poetry. musical poetry. poem songs. pongs."
  
  Musical stylings aside, what sets Davis apart is her approach to verse. Her writing is direct and naked, unobscured by metaphor or heavy symbolism. And within the arrangement, the lyrics always take centre stage whether she is performing solo, accompanied by an instrument or two, or a full band. The power is in her directness.
  
  "What can be compelling about spoken work is the use of language. Language is so powerful and if it's delivered well…" she trails off. "Writing for performance is different than for it to remain in the page. It's infinite what someone could say up there. There's a privilege—we can say what we want."
  
  Her influences reflect that. They include Kinnie Starr, Shane Koyzcan, Bright Eyes, John K. Sampson of The Weakerthans and locally Shauntay Grant, Benn Ross and Amelia Curran. For Davis, performance was an afterthought—hard to grasp given that she's played musical instruments most of her life including piano and flute and, even in conversation, her voice is captivating.
  
  "Performance wasn't ever what I saw myself doing. I've always wanted to be a writer," she says, sitting in her kitchen on a leafy street in Halifax. She studied English at university, but dropped it, deciding she didn't need a degree for that, choosing instead to move to Ottawa to take health sciences.
  
  "Poetry has a bad rap," she says. "The poetry I learned in school didn't interest me. In general, poetry can be 'blahh poetry'…but people come up to me and say 'I don't really like poetry, but I like that,'" as in what she just did.
  
  Davis writes frequently about love, sharing personal stories of people who've come in and out of her life. She also uses her writing to explore larger ideas and to voice the questions she's left with. In "Art" she challenges the relevance of her own passion: "I wondered what would be the worth of my words in the world/If I write them and then recite them, are they worth being heard?/Just because I like them, does that mean I should mic them and see what might unfurl?"
  
  Similarly, in "Keep it on My Fridge" she writes of making a list of all the things she isn't doing: "I could do more favours/help more old ladies cross the street/Savour my chocolate and behave more neighbourly/I could do lots of things." Only to then interrogate herself as to her motives: "And if I became this magnanimous person maybe I would win/Or maybe it's just a means to ease my conscience/Make a list and cross things off of it."
  
  What Davis doesn't dispute is her need to feel. "I'm a Leo, I love to be in love," she says. "I fall easily in love." And she writes of this most movingly. Several of the songs on her CD are about love affairs, some that have fallen by the wayside, some of convenience and some written during the throws of infatuation. It is intensely personal and honest writing and looked at as a whole, Make a List speaks volumes about the complex nature of relationships. In "Something" she sings to an occasional lover: "We have no time for this/Some kind of lovers and some kind of friends/And if you had a type I wouldn't be it/But we have something, we have something."
  
  While in the track "Long Distance" she sings to a former girlfriend: "We were a good fit/And if we would have moved in we would have had a good kitchen and cooked the best food/But we didn't/You stayed in that city and I came to this one/Now things are different."
  
  Davis is as candid in person as she is on stage. Born 27 years ago in Summerside, PEI, she led a typical life in a small rural town. She was good in school, played sports, had a boyfriend, whom for a while she thought she might marry. But she was miserable and didn't know why.
  
  "I just fit in OK," she says. "I wanted people not to notice me. Inside I was really tormented. I was stifled and I didn't know I was." She says she didn't figure out she was gay until after high school, but was "just really messy and over-emotional."
  
  She eventually hitchhiked to BC—she wouldn't do it again—where she discovered spoken word, and politics, and cooking. "I grew up on processed food in PEI," she says. "In BC I dated someone at a culinary institute and it was like 'Oh, and avocado. Cool!'" She also had her first all-consuming relationship there, during which she says she lost her writing. "I used to be fuelled by misery. I used to be a crier. I cried every day. I was that tortured artist. I was high-low, high-low, but I've found that balance. Now I think that's kind of bullshit for me."
  
  Currently single, Davis says she hasn't tested her ability to be in a relationship while retaining her discipline for writing, but love continues to be a strong theme in her work. Moving back to the east coast to "hit the reset button" she says, has given her the focus, community and—judging by the musical community's profoundly positive response—the support she's needed to go forward.
  
  "I'm happier now than I've ever been," she says, "I feel fulfilled."
  
  And forward is where Tanya Davis is headed.
  
  Tanya Davis plays Ginger's on November 22 and the Seahorse on November 25.
  
  Shayla Howell is a freelance journalist and TV segment producer. She's spent the last two months on blustery, beautiful PEI having drinks at the Blue Fin and seeing movies at an actual rep theatre.
  
  

• CD Review [+ Show ]
  

  Tanya Davis Make a List (independent) The best local release in recent memory, Make a List’s char...Tanya Davis
  Make a List
  (independent)
  The best local release in recent memory, Make a List’s charm lies in Davis’ brilliant lyrical delivery. A mix of fragile melodies and solid spoken word, Davis effortlessly draws the listener into each song, where they are rewarded with tasteful musicianship and inspired poetry.
  Chuck Teed
  categories: Local artist,Canadian artist,Best of the year (2006)
  

Setlist

Tanya can play a solo set up to one hour of original material and/or with her full band for 45-60 minutes of original material. She also plays occassionally with just a drummer/percussionist and has over an hour's worth of memorized performance poetry in her repetoire.

Original songs:
Art
The Drums
Keep it on my fridge
Potatoes
Trusty Umbrella
Poetry
Us this day
This Sadness
As I Lay Sleeping
Gorgeous Morning
the River Runs
Thesaurus
Where the ocean meets the greenery
Baby lion
Fortress
Firebug
Do more

Basic Requirements

Calendar