Out There in the World

When Sarah Harmer sings, “Take me out in the roaring wind/ We’ll get lost” on her new album, Are You Gone, she’s not talking metaphorically. This Canadian singer-songwriter is as much an environmental activist as she is a musician. In fact, Are You Gone is her first release in a decade—she spent much of the 2010s leading a grassroots movement to protect The Niagara Escarpment against a damaging mining project. The land, she says, “needed local citizens to fight for it. And there’s as much work in that department as you have time for.”

Eventually, though, she needed to get back into the studio. “The longer I waited, the louder the voices in my head got: ‘Why aren’t you singing?’” she explains.

Her fans were surely thinking the same thing. Harmer had already made some sizeable ripples, thanks to a well-received tour with Indigo Girls and her 2000 debut You Were Here, a folk hit that crackled like a lullaby version of Neko Case or Jenny Lewis. Her 2005 record I’m a Mountain won three Juno Awards, but there’s no denying that she veered away from music in service of a noble cause.

The songs on Are You Gone— from beautiful, heartsick piano ballads to wind-blown folk-rock jams, all with Harmer’s gorgeous voice swirling through the guitar—don’t take the natural world for granted. She sings about fruit trees blossoming, frozen bays ripe for skating and garden gates left open to rabbits—and there’s even a mention of fossil fuels. But they’re also lovely, lilting, very human songs, packed with emotion and vulnerability.

“There is so much detail and nuance out there in the living world,” Harmer admits. “I remember an old quote about nature and the imagination being two very old friends.”

That nuance shines through, mapping human emotion to the minute details of nature. “Some songs came from real moments of disappointment and pain; others are tips of the hat to some wonderful people I’ve known and loved,” she says.

However, Are You Gone is not an overtly political album about climate change. While Harmer holds climate activism close to her heart, she believes there are some basic solutions to the public’s apathy.

“People need to get more exposure and unscheduled time outside to ramble and roam,” she says. “Building a little relationship with that tree, this creek, those birds—walking, wandering.”