Ferron's songs are autobiographical in the purest sense: she writes about things that have really happened in her life. The experiences are rendered with such emotional and artistic perfection that her songs become mirrors to the soul. While the outer events unfold as a story, the inner, deeper landscape beckons us to the realm of fate, choice, paradox, and sensuality. Her singing combines the hard edge of life with the tenderness of unbounded love, forming a kind of chant to reality. The words are chiseled from everyday hard stone, from reality, without prettiness.
Ferron's craft rests on her ability to experiment and to create sophisticated musical-poetic forms that communicate her feelings and beliefs. Although highly crafted, the result is direct and intimate. Ferron's playful and serious sense of form is a delight for the keen ear, but it's just as delightful to let her songs just wash through you. Art is about those different levels of engagement, about the continual play between illusion and reality.
"I like to take people who can't write at all and help them to realize their own precious story, their own point of view. There's a lot of fun in that, to write that stuff and see what matters and how it matters. I like the idea of people discovering their voice, their palette of memories. It's as weird as a dream."
"To be a writer, you have to know where you are, or where you're not. A lot of the writing is done to get somewhere, which is why the songs sometimes go on. Writing is like spending time with a song, kind of like a date. It's exciting. I remember years ago learning that underneath anger was sorrow. Why stop halfway when you can go to the bottom of the ocean? You cannot stay there: The way out is through a transcendent sense of belonging. I notice myself saying now that my religion is `yes.'" This rare workshop is limited to 16 people.
Born in Toronto and raised in a struggling working class environment near Vancouver, Ferron left home at 15 to work and to develop the music that was growing inside her. As she performed, she continually put her heart on the line. By the time Rolling Stone had given Shadows on a Dime a 4-star rating, she had already gained a nearly fanatical following. Ferron's deeply introspective, sometimes oblique lyrics and the hushed, splintered grain of her voice invited comparisons with Bob Dylan. The Boston Globe claimed that "someday, they will call Dylan the Ferron of the '60s." She toured with the Indigo Girls on and off from 1990 to 1996, yet she's remained something less than a household name, but something more than a legend."I feel this responsibility to say something and have it be true for me. The gift to me is finding that my work somehow resonates on a deep level with other people, and they find that it is also true for them." - Ferron