Image description: A photograph of an adult with long brown hair, wearing a white knitted turtleneck sweater with pink, green and blue. They are playing an electric guitar and looking at it. The background is white, with an acoustic guitar hanging on the wall on their left.

Dorothea Paas

Dorothea Paas, one of Canada’s most beloved singer-songwriters, has played her unique, prismatic style of folk songcraft for audiences across North America for over a decade, and lent her talents as a guitarist and vocalist to artists like Jennifer Castle, U.S. Girls and Badge Epoque Ensemble. The songs on her debut album, Anything Can’t Happen, have been through a near-infinite number of forms – Paas has played them solo and with a full band, electric and acoustic, at house shows and in sold-out venues. They manage to fit inside each context, like water taking the shape of its container.

All of this makes Anything Can’t Happen feel far more mature and complex than a debut album. It’s a statement of purpose, a next step in a decade-long process of artistic growth and evolution, and a bridge between the DIY style of Paas’s previous cassette releases and a more refined studio sensibility. Recorded in studios in Hamilton and Toronto, and mixed by Max Turnbull of Badge Epoque and U.S. Girls and Steve Chahley, these songs bring a diverse range of musical influences into conversation: inflected with the layered reverberations of Grouper, shot through with the piercing harmonies of the Roches, electrified with the searing energy of Sonic Youth. You can hear Neil Young in the grittiness of the title track’s guitar; Joni Mitchell’s Hejira in the album’s lyrics, Fairport Convention in Paas’s voice. The influence of Stevie Wonder - one of Paas’s greatest musical role models - is present too, in the album’s conceptual foundations. - Emma Healey

STREAM LINKS / INSTAGRAM / TWITTER / TIKTOK / FACEBOOK

Video description: A video of an adult with long blonde hair and colourful eyeshadow at an amusement park. The shots are mostly close ups. Other shots show the performer in front of a waterfall or beside the sea.