In the event that you happen to be reading this review in order to decide whether or not to purchase Charles Spearin’s record The Happiness Project, I will attempt to make that decision easier for you.  If you enjoy music which inspires some basic level of reflective thought, and you are not afraid to step outside your comfort zone a bit, beyond the industry standards for music easily defined by terms like “pop” or “rock”, then I would strongly cadge you to just purchase the record from Arts & Crafts (you can preview the record online there), or [amazonify]B001M4L5Z2::text::::somewhere else[/amazonify].  If you are unreflective or uncomfortable trying new things, I would suggest exploring your world a bit, reading some good books, and then buying the album and listening to it in a few years.

For myself, as both a self-diagnosed music junkie and a self-knighted meaning-ferreter, I am always particularly enticed by musicians who seem to work as hard as putting meaning into their pieces as I try to work getting it out.  That said, in my rather snobbish opinion, it is a rare album indeed which can exhibit a pretty clear goal¹ yet not dilute it to the point of total ambiguity, triteness, or perhaps just propaganda.  For succeeding where so many others have failed, I tip my hat to Charles Spearin.

Charles Spearin is certainly more well known as a membership in and contributions to Do Make Say Think

, Broken Social Scene, Valley of the Giants, and KC Accidental.  In fact, despite the Spearin’s undeniable musical talent, prior to the release his new record The Happiness Project, a Google search for “Charles Spearin” was more likely to take you to fans of his moustache than fans of his music.  This has since changed, and with good reason².

I should mention one quick caveat; Spearin’s Happiness Project falls within the much-maligned category of “concept albums”.  The so-called “project” around which the album centers is a series of seemingly informal interviews to which Charles Spearin subjected his neighbors, friends, and family on the general topic of happiness; Spearin and company then proceeded to arrange music inspired by the interviewees’ responses.  For my own part, before hearing the album I recognized this concept as laudable but likely dubious, at the risk of becoming trite.  However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the actualization came off as personal, particular, varied, and earnest enough to actually be insightful.  I suspect, also, that the apparent sincerity of the record’s attempt to broach the topic of happiness is not hermetically confined to Spearin’s respondents.  Certainly, if Spearin had much to do with the directional changes evident in Do Make Say Think’s marvellous last record You, You’re a History in Rust (Constellation, 2007), the topic of human happiness and interrelationship has been on the man’s mind for some time now³.

To finally get back to The Happiness Project itself, the album opens with one of the most conceptually simple, musically basic, topically relevant, an–in my view–powerful testamonials of disc.  If I may refer to each track as a case study, the first of these is of “Mrs. Morris” and her simple recipe for obtaining and mainting happiness.  As Mrs. Morris describes her basic application of love–rambling enough to show her sincerity and excitement, her rhythm and pitch are matched closely by a saxophone, forcing the listener to recognize the strange, comforting music flowing from her irrepressably human voice.  Mrs. Morris’s track clocks-in at under a minute and a half, and in a traditional musical sense it is certainly the most raw, sparse track on the whole album, yet she kicks off the album in a saliently meaningful way through her words, mood, attitude, as well as the surprisingly musical correspondence of her voice and mimicking instrumentation.  Although Arts & Crafts Records appears to be promoting the much more tradtional musical composition of track 2, Anna, I hold that Mrs. Morris’s account is the most dense, meaningful, and original–and I like to think that Spearin tacitly endorses my position by reprising Mrs. Morris at the end of the record.

That is not say that Anna lack’s meaning.  Indeed, it is only a testament to the record’s strengths that a track like Anna could be considered below its cohorts on the album.  Anna is a more straightforward song, heavily jazz-oriented with bits sampled bird chirps, based again on the rhythm, and to a lesser extent melody, of the “music” already present in Anna’s voice as she provides a few brief, insightful comments about happiness and her work with challenged young women.  Anna is double the length of Mrs. Morris, with the bulk of the latter half being repetition of the more meaningful first half.

Vittoria, the third song, is a much more light-hearted, yet jazzy track inspired by the stuttering responses of young Vittoria as she talks, apparently, about her schoolwork.  While happiness does not seem to be addressed directly per se, I think we can all learn a little something about happiness from a little child who spits out the brief phrase “you don’t get to do work”–as if she is so uninitiated into the cultural pension for defining our duties as drudgery that she is still able to approach many hated tasks with enthusiasm.

Vanessa–who follows Vittoria–broaches the topic of happiness via a discussion of deafness and coclear implants–a topic certainly foreign to most musical compositions.  My personal experiences made this testamonial come alive, but any music lover without much experience with deaf culture should grab this track and mull for a while.  Musically, this piece moves from the upbeat, jazzier approach to a softer and more Do-Make-Say-Think-like hum with a bit of light piano playing in the background.

Marisa follows next.  Her voice is shadowed by a somewhat unmelodic harp, as if foreshadowing her eventual assertion that her attempt to answer Spearin’s questions was a failure.  Her thoughts focus on human interaction, and though she stumbles a bit, I suspect she does so no more than we all do in our attempts to consider the broad topic of human happiness.  Her track is both serious and fun; like her answer, the music is both melodic and experimental, depending on the moment.  Do Make Say Think fans should be able to invest in this track for the music alone without disappointment.

Next on the record is Ondine, another young girl with seemingly little of relevance to say, but determined and astute syncretizers will find a good way to equate her whining with insight on human happiness⁴.  If nothing else, I managed to glean a little happiness directly from this track, laughing just a little bit out loud as I considered how such a little thing seemed to have such a grand effect on the happiness of this child, while interpreting the violin which follows her voice as a tiny (read: world’s smallest) little instrument.

Mr. Gowrie engages in active conversation, then, with Charles Spearin.  With the exception of Mrs. Morris, Mr. Gowrie‘s track seems the broadest attempt to discussing happiness.  Spearin’s accompaniament begins by anticipating Mr. Gowrie‘s voice, and then later extends it into a vague, rolling atmospheric melody persisting through the song’s close with quiet assaults from other instruments, especially the violin.  At times in this short song I could not help but reflect soberly, but at other times I was struck by irrepressable smiles.

The Happiness Project closes with another rendition, this one more melodic and more musically complex, of Mrs. Morris.  This brings the album to a nice refrain and close, and I should hope it is enough to cause a bit of pause to encouring a little mulling on the topic which Charles Spearin initiated at the album’s outset.  Despite some of the simple responses that some of the interviewees give, I did not find  any simple answers, but I found a few new interesting questions and a bit more cause to reflect on questions with which I am already long acquainted.  I think many of these questions relate not as much to happiness specifically as they do to humanity in general, and perhaps that philosophical trope “the good life”.  If nothing else, Spearin’s voice-inspired music should give us pause for how to relate to humans in a different self-other relationship.  When others speak, what are we listening to?  What does it mean to “hear” each other?  Does it matter how we approach listening to others?  Perhaps listening to the music of the voice of the other is a romantic exaggeration of the respect we ought to have for our fellow humans.  Or, perhaps this notion is only a distraction from really listening; isn’t it the same as Kierkegaard’s aesthete who entertained himself not by understanding the philosopher’s drivel, but by watching the beads of sweat form and jump from his nose?

At any rate, I implore you to listen to the record and tell me or others what you get out of it.