THE QUEER SONGBOOK ORCHESTRA at the Music Gallery (197 John), Sunday (September 21), 8 pm. $15-$25. SS, Glad Day Bookshop.
A Toronto chamber pop ensemble is cleaning out the closet’s music section.
On Sunday, the 12-piece Queer Songbook Orchestra will perform pop classics in the vein of the Great American Songbook with a focus on the material’s queer backstories.
The tunes fall into two categories: those written by closeted writers and songs with particular significance to closeted queers. QSO bandleader Shaun Brodie’s ultimate goal is to amass a library of music that has shaped LGBT experiences, both communal and personal.
The group’s inaugural performance was at Kensington Market gallery Videofag in March and featured new arrangements of Joe Meek’s Telstar, Cole Porter’s Love For Sale and Stevie Wonder’s Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer. The upcoming performance will mix songs from the first show with new additions including the Smiths’ Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want and Billy Strayhorn’s Day Dream.
“I’ve always had a fascination with the concept of the closet, and the way we as kids navigate that time and that idea of self-preservation and surviving it,” explains Brodie, who came out at 21 while studying classical music at the University of Victoria. “Music means so much, and these songs connect to you when you feel like you have nobody to talk to.”
For Brodie, a session trumpet player for the Hidden Cameras, Basia Bulat and Dan Mangan, one such song is Dusty Springfield’s Son Of A Preacher Man, recorded in 1968. He loved it growing up, but didn’t realize why until much later.
“I never would have acknowledged it at the time, but whenever the song would come on the radio it would work its way around my denial,” he says, adding that he hopes to add the song to the QSO repertoire. “It gave me some kind of excitement to imagine I was the female voice in it. I really wanted to be Dusty, but I wouldn’t admit it.”
The group also delves into hits with little-known queer histories, like Rodgers and Hart’s Blue Moon. Lorenz Hart, the hard-drinking lyricist of the seminal American songwriting duo, wrote some of the greatest love songs of all time in the 1920s and 30s. He was known to be gay, but his romantic life remained a secret, and he died in the closet at 48, apparently without ever having found a lasting love.
Brodie has also partnered with the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives to give the QSO’s research, stories and recordings a permanent and publicly accessible home. That affiliation also gives the project charitable status.
Future performances will venture out of the closet into classic and modern queer anthems, musicals, Canadian artists and perennial gay favourites like Madonna and Dolly Parton. Audience members are also encouraged to contribute.
“I don’t want it to be all about the hard times and tragic stories of people who never got to live outside the closet and drank themselves to death,” says Brodie. “I want it to be representative of the community as a whole, to be able to tell these stories from different angles.”
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