Helena Deland

Helena Deland at Songbyrd

Thursday April 1st

Helena Deland

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Eternity Shrugs begins with an act of trespass. At a party, Helena Deland slips toward the edge of the room; no one sees her as she eyes a notebook which belongs to the party’s host. She insists she would never read it, then lets herself imagine being caught, only to learn that its owner had wanted to be discovered all along. The journal becomes a mirror of songwriting, private experience made public and placed in strangers’hands.

Deland’s third solo album follows the electronic density of Someone New (2020) and the grief-shadowed folk of Goodnight Summerland (2023). Recorded in rural Quebec in bursts over four seasons, Eternity Shrugs was produced by Deland with longtime bandmates Francis Ledoux and Alexandre Larin, as well as musicians Lysandre Ménard and Cedric Martel who have played with the band for years. Piano, bass, organ, Rhodes, viola, and woodwinds gather around her voice and guitar in patient arrangements anchored by finely textured percussion; the songs can feel spare one moment and subtly ornate the next.

Near the record’s centre, the piano-lit “Room” blooms with an external voice addressing Deland in the second person, a returning motif that allows one of the album’s characters to speak back to its author. In “Great Dreams,” a meteor shower and an easy silence widen into cinema through 1960s-era strings and a bass line that glances toward Lee Hazlewood, while Montreal contemporary Cindy Lee flickers at the edge of the frame. Deland imagines the album’s palette in browns: wood, leather, smoke. Warm and inhabited, the music never entirely settles.

“Where I Stand,” inspired by seeing Lucinda Williams perform at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, turns the infinite into a missed call: eternity spins Deland across an empty dance floor, then shrugs and hangs up.