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Local Canadian singer and comedian Shirley Gnome sat down with the ‘Richmond Sentinel’ to discuss her career, tour experience, and career inspirations.

Photo courtesy ‘Richmond Sentinel’

Richmond Stories: Shirley Gnome

By Matthew Cheung

Published 11:44 PDT, Fri October 25, 2024

Last Updated: 12:13 PDT, Fri October 25, 2024

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In this edition of Richmond Stories, Richmond Sentinel host Jim Gordon (JG) sat down with local Canadian singer comedian Shirley Gnome (SG) at the office to discuss her career, tour experience, and past awards.

JG: She is a Canadian singer living in Richmond and has toured the world with her one-woman show; wowing audiences and critics alike, the person I’m talking about Shirley Gnome. Tell our viewers what is it you see, hear, read, that inspires you to do what you do?

SG: The first thought I had was not that I want to do to this, but that I like this. I didn’t think I was going to do this for a living, influences in my childhood developed my love for silly songs. The first is Weird Al, known for his parody songs, who also had a lot of originals. Canadian groups: The Arrogant Worms, Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, and Corky and the Juice Pigs were bands in the 90s that had cultural influence. It wasn’t much later, that I thought maybe I can do this because it didn’t occur to me it was something girls could do.

JG: As someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, even on shows like Sunday Night Live (SNL), women were kind of the accessories; it was a guy’s room. That is not the case anymore, I’m happy to say, but what’s great about what you do as well is that, you’re a very good singer. You’re doing it very seriously, but they’re laughing hysterically, does that sort of disarm the audience?

SG: When I work on all my albums, this is something that my producer Kevin pointed out to me, it’s like we’re taking this very seriously. We’re producing this album, putting all the effort and skill that’s required to make it sound like an album, so that when you’re listening to it, if you don’t pay attention to the lyrics, you’d think this is just a nice song and then you’ll go “wait, what did you just say?”. That’s the approach, I think disarming is a good way to describing it, I think also maybe confusing too. It gets into people and kind of opens a soft spot, then you can really get them.

JG: For a lot of people who may not know, your show, is very musical. I watched one of the songs you do called Selfish, which as you said, you’re going for angst ‘90s, but then as I listened on, I paused and asked myself “what did she just say?”. Tell our viewers about what they can see when you do your show because you do a lot of things.

SG: Essentially, what you walk into is a concert, I’m a singer / songwriter and I’m going to sing you some songs that are sort of an a spectrum between satirical to absurd. I like to use the musicality of different genres and juxtapose them with the messages that I put into the songs. A very serious angsty song, can be about something very innocuous or something you wouldn’t make that dramatic. Just constantly combining those things and trying to keep the audience guessing where I’m going to go.

JG: Talk about the difference between being on stage, getting that feedback, and being in the studio just recording with your team? How do you generate that feedback?

SG: What I do is I will go out and play those songs for audiences first before I record them. I will try them out a little bit, making sure that I’ve got all of the jokes lined up in the right place and that I know it will land. Then I go into the studio with the confidence knowing I have a good one. We also have people come in and listen to demos and I watch them listen to it so I can see when they are really focused and when they’re not.

JG: How do you find audiences and are there notable differences amongst cities?

SG: From city to city, I would say so. Social, economic, and political flavours from different cities will affect how they perceive different jokes and different genres too. When I go to Alberta, they really love country music, if I go somewhere else, you could tell people are like “I don’t know if I like country music”, and then I started only doing country music. I do a lot of things, like folk rock, electro pop, R&B, but I play a lot of acoustic guitar, allowing me to do a lot of folk and country, kind of in the middle section of the show and keep it like that. Some people are more inclined to like that in certain places, and some might be a little more resistant. Certain jokes as well, land differently in different places, it’s kind of like travelling through humour.

JG: You have a big live recording session on December 7, where will that be taking place.

SG: We will be having that live record session at the 604 Records Sound Stage, I will be going on tour with them this fall with their company Comedy Here Often?, their comedy label , and they have this beautiful space there. Because we want to make it sound as good as possible, doing it in the sound stage with all the recording gear there, we’re going to build an audience setting into it.

For the full interview, visit richmondsentinel.ca/videos