Hers are the sorts of songs that you find drifting through your head upon waking, or humming in the middle of the day at work, or haunting you just before bed when the lights are turned low. Karyn Ellis' acoustic pop songs are rife with catchy melodies and lyrical contemplations that are at once deceptively whimsical and profoundly resonant.
Karyn is a singer-songwriter / acoustic pop artist from Toronto Ontario, Canada. She has released two albums to date: an EP called Bird (2003), and a full length album called Hearts Fall (2005). In the fall of 2009 she releases her third album, a full-length CD entitled Even Though The Sky Was Falling.
Born in the suburbs of London, England, Karyn was brought to Canada as an eighteen-month-old babe in arms. She settled in with her family into a household steeped with jazz and classical music piping through the stereo. Other than a brief period living in New Jersey while she was in high school (where she played trumpet in the marching band), Karyn has continued to live in Ontario. Two years of opera training at Queen’s University and a lifetime of singing along to records by her favourite artists such as Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and more recently Hawksley Workman and Martin Tielli have shaped her musical sensibility in a way you can’t quite put your finger on. But it is instantly recognizable – Karyn has taken all of these influences and melded them into a sound that is distinctly and memorably hers.
In 2003, Karyn released a six song EP called Bird, an album that basked in its low-production values – Karyn recorded the album on a four-track in her bedroom and in the basement of Toronto audio recording school. While simple in its production, the album introduced Karyn to the music scene as a determined McGuyver; she painstakingly hand printed and assembled 900 copies of the CD’s cover before declaring that edition “out of print”. The effort did not go unnoticed: a mere five days after Karyn lovingly hand addressed a package containing her CD and mailed it out to CBC hosts across the country, Karyn's album received its first national radio airplay. Bill Richardson, then of the nationally airing afternoon show Richardson’s Round Up, aired the title track Bird simply commenting, “It’s lovely”.
Bird set flight for her second full-length album, and in 2005 Karyn released Hearts Fall, which was essentially recorded live one afternoon during the winter of 2005. She, band mates Tom Howelland James Thomson, and engineer Ian Gibbons manning a portable recording station took over a 85-seater Hamilton theatre during down time and recorded what was to become an eleven song album. Back in the studio Gary Craig, one of Canada’s renowned drummers who has played with such artists as Bruce Cockburn and Kathleen Edwards, overdubbed delicate drum tracks to fill out the arrangements. Mixed and Mastered by James Paul (Rogue Studios), Hearts Fall maintained its live ensemble feel offering simple arrangements of her songs that stayed true to her solo singer-songwriter vibe. She toured the album across Canada on several occasions, doing the coffee house and small theatre circuit and sharing stages with Jill Barber, Geoff Berner, David Celia, Annabelle Chvostek of the Wailin' Jennies, Ndidi Onukwulu, Roxanne Potvin, Claire Jenkins Avec Band, Justin Rutledge and Madison Violet, among others.
Hearts Fall saw even greater CBC playlisting than her first EP both nationally and regionally on programs such as The Vinyl Café, Bandwidth, Here and Now and Radio International. It spent six months on various campus radio charts across Canada including five weeks on CIUT Toronto top-30 topping at 3 and reaching the national monthly campus Top-50 and folk/roots/blues Top-20 charts. Karyn’s music has appeared on playlists as a far as Australia and all across Europe, and Hearts Fall received high praise in several of Europe's online music magazines as well as a Top-Ten DJ pick for album of the year in 2006 from a prominent alt-country website in the Netherlands.
In fall 2009, Karyn releases her third album, (her second full-length record) entitled Even Though The Sky Was Falling, produced by Karyn Ellis and Don Kerr. Don Kerr is known for his work with Ron Sexsmith and the Rheostatics, both as a producer and as a top-rated drummer. The ten original songs on Karyn’s new album include an assortment of arrangements and instruments including piano, banjo, glockenspiel, vocal harmonies, a small string section as well as understated orchestral horns arranged by Creaking Tree String Quartet’s Brian Kobayakawa.
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