It’s not often that drinking beer on a porch can start a revolution. But then, it’s not often that you find a house like the one on Bellwoods Avenue in Toronto, where ohbijou lead singer and songwriter Casey Mejica lives with her sister and bandmate, Jenny.
The house has become home base for a growing music scene that extends beyond ohbijou and has come to encom bands such as we’re marching on, Kids on TV, The D’Urbervilles, and The Acorn.
“When I was growing up, I always liked listening to Hayden and Julie Doiron and they had, like, this community of music in Hamilton that they used to go to and play shows and things like that,” Mejica said over the phone in an interview with the Journal.
“I want to have friends and have creative things bustling in the house, so I started to ask people if they wanted to play shows there and they did and our house became a place where you could sit on the porch and drink beer in the summer.” Mecija’s Bellwoods house has a recording studio and practice space in the basement, and has been the stage for a number of shows.
Last summer, enough beer flowed at Bellwoods to create a solid compilation of emerging artists, mostly from Ontario, who all had some connection to the house. The album, titled Friends in Bellwoods, was produced by Mejica and ohbijou’s drummer, James Bunton.
The compilation has been a sort-of fencing in of the artists who participate in the Bellwoods community, artists whose geographic locations range from London to Montreal.
“Everyone is connected within a couple of degrees to our living room and basement in someway. Or we’ve gone out and seen a band play and we, like ohbijou, has really enjoyed them so maybe we thought they were a vital part of being on the record too,” Mejica said. “Everyone has some sort of connection. No one is on it just for the sake of being on it.”
ohbijou is the glue that holds this sometimes unlikely assembly of musicians together. Pianist Ryan Carley’s solo act water colour has a track, as does bassist Andrew Kinoshita’s Grand Mouse House project. Musically, most of the tracks are folky, acoustic wandering songs, with the same whimsical qualities as the seven-piece pop orchestra.
Many of the artists on the album met through playing together at small venues across Ontario, and networking websites like Myspace allowed the community to develop.
Between front-porch sitting and making friends at shows, the community and the Bellwoods house has brought a small-town vibe to the indie pop scene, something that translates on the Bellwoods album. There’s a sort of shameless small world naiveté in the fact that Friends in Bellwoods includes Mejica’s housemate (Oak Oak), childhood friend (Tim Ford) and her sister’s high school boyfriend (Nich Worby) on the album.
“I think that when you are involved with music and you play music, you go to different places and you meet a lot of like-minded people or a lot of musicians that you are floored by or you think are amazing, and you spend a night with them at the show drinking beer and then you become friends,” Mejica said.
“That’s I guess how community starts, because when you want to help each other out and you go to their shows, it’s like this self-propelling.”
Jonas Bonnetta, an experimental pop soloist, was one of the people who connected with ohbijou, after meeting them at a show in Oshawa. He contributed an acoustic version of his song, “French Toast,” to the compilation.
“It’s really just all of our friends. We were just bored in the summer, and they [ohbijou] wanted to put the effort into recording,” Bonnetta said.
The mission statement on the album’s website says “the warm weather brought a wave of needing to ‘get shit done.’ So we spent our summer days recording, singing, indulging …” That expression of summery indulgence comes across in the tracks, as does the feeling that each recording session is actually just a bunch of friends hanging out in their bare feet.
Bonnetta said working on the Bellwoods project may have been his best recording experience yet.
“People were coming and going all day long, and people would stay and record on it or just hang out drinking wine,” he said.
“There were literally just 10 people hanging out in the basement. It was pretty magical.” Queen’s student and innovative folk adventurer Nich Worby also has a song on the album—the quirky, marching-band pop ditty “All Blind Mice”—and he described a similar recording experience.
“I don’t even know all the people who danced, sang and clapped on my record. Over the last couple of months I’ve been trying to collect names,” Worby said.
Though many of the bands on the album call Toronto home and the Bellwoods house has become a sort of nucleus for the scene in the “big city,” as Mejica calls it, the Bellwoods community reaches further.
Many of the artists are originally from, or still living in, smaller communities, including Bonnetta, who grew up in Orono and recently moved to Peterborough;
Friday Morning’s Regret, which includes from Cobourg; and Tim Ford, Worby, and the Mejica sisters, who all hail from Brantford.
Worby said the Bellwoods crew is externally focused, both in helping other artists and the larger community. Many of the shows at the Bellwood house have been benefits, including a benefit show to pay for hip surgery for Mejica’s dog, Appleby. Likewise all the proceeds from the Friends in Bellwoods album will go Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank.
“It’s definitely a community, a group of people producing art, and at the same time they feel a social responsibility to the community.” he said. “People are trying hard to make sure that this is sustainable.”
More than just providing a recording studio or a hangout, Mejica said she draws inspiration for her own work from the musicians and artists who the community.
“I’m inspired by the people that I’m surrounded by and the music that they’re creating,” she said.
“Looking at really good friends and their bands and how amazing their songs are is a complete inspiration and helps me write better because you get to study how they do their things.” The Bellwoods community isn’t interested in hogging all the good ideas. While those small-town artists might find much of their and inspiration through the Bellwoods crew, they’re taking the fruits of that interaction back home, revitalizing many music scenes that had been feeling the loss of artists who were drawn to the sustainability of playing in a bigger city.
Mejica talked about growing up in Brantford and the way that the establishment of the Ford Plant—a concert venue, art gallery and recording studio—has brought new life to a small, industrial city—an initiative that has largely been headed up by the aforementioned Ford.
“The population is like 82,000 but for kids in high school it feels like a really small, desolate town, so with nothing else to do we just wrote music,” she said. “Tim Ford has spearheaded a huge revolution there. Revolution is so severe, but he’s done an amazing thing for that city, like what Nich is probably doing with Kingston and what other people are doing with the cities they live in.”
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Ohbijou is bringing the revolution to the Artel on February 23, with Kingston banjo player, Annie Clifford. Advance tickets are available at Brian’s Record Option for $10, or at the door for $15. To order Friends in Bellwoods or to learn more about the project, visit www.friendsinbellwoods.com.
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