Exploring her musical DNA: Mary Fahl to perform at Fort Hill

It was a dark period — for everyone, of course, locked down to stem the spread of COVID-19; and for singer-songwriter Mary Fahl, who lost her mother to age and a sister to ALS. It was a time of sorrow and bereavement, and, with these family losses, a feeling of rootlessness. 

“I kept thinking, what would I write about?” she recalled. “Everything I wrote would sound angry and dystopian.” 

For solace — and a connection to her roots — Fahl turned to the music that meant the most to her in her youth, the records she’d borrowed from her older siblings’ rooms and ordered from record-club deals. The Mamas and the Papas. The Moody Blues. Judy Collins. George Harrison. Electric Light Orchestra. 

“I felt, what is my home? My musical home was from my youth, about the ages of 12 or 13, when I began to develop my own taste in music,” Fahl said. “Songs I just love on a level that’s — they’re like family to me, in terms of their being in my musical DNA rather than my family DNA.” 

Fahl's most recent studio album then represents a musical family reunion. The 2022 release “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” (title from the ELO song) includes reinterpreted versions of ten 1960s and 1970s songs — famous ones like the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” and the Moody Blues’ “Tuesday Afternoon,” and lesser-known gems like Nick Drake’s “River Man” and Richard and Linda Thompson’s “The Great Valerio.” 

Fahl, known for a rich contralto voice, will perform many of those songs at her concert Saturday, Oct. 1, at Fort Hill Performing Arts Center in Canandaigua, along with songs from her solo career and October Project, the chamber-pop band of which she was a member in their original 1990s lineup, and which she says had a big Rochester following at the time. The Fort Hill show is Fahl’s first time performing in the Rochester area since the October Project days, she said. 

Those childhood days listening to ELO, George Harrison and others were formative – and the songs continue to evoke family for her. She had one brother who was into British folk, a brother into British prog and a sister into the great female singers of the day. She became familiar with such singers as Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny and prog band Renaissance’s Annie Haslam, among the first singers she found similar to her own voice. 

“I could go to anybody’s room in the house and play their records when they weren’t home. It was a fabulous musical education,” she said, adding, “They weren’t so happy; as a little kid I didn’t always take good care of their records.” 

The original lineup of October Project, known for close vocal harmonies, featured Fahl along with singers Emil Adler (also keyboardist) and Julie Sullivan, and yielded such songs as “Ariel,” “Bury My Lovely” and “Return to Me,” the latter included in the soundtrack to the Tommy Lee Jones/Jeff Bridges movie “Blown Away.” The band in its original configuration was signed to a major label, Sony BMG subsidiary Epic Records, and released two albums, “October Project” and “Falling Further In,” before Epic opted not to renew their contract. The band would eventually reform without Fahl, who moved on to a solo career. 

“I had to go back to a day job,” she recalled, doing consulting work and some TV commercials. “I thought if I’m going to stay in the business, I’m going to have to learn to write. It was very scary for me; the bar was set very high with October Project." She allows, “I got better at it as I went along.”  

She released an EP, “Lenses of Contact,” in 2000, and hired a band to tour behind it, many of whom would later form the folk group Olabelle. And in 2001 she auditioned with Sony Classical (“of all people,” she noted), singing some medieval music and an aria as well as her own songs. Her 2003 album with Sony Classical,” “The Other Side of Time,” was an eclectic project featuring mostly her own songs, and with some operatic and Middle Eastern-influenced songs (one in Italian and one in Mozarabic). Two of the songs were featured in films: “Going Home” in “Gods and Generals,” and the traditional Irish song “The Dawning of the Day,” in “The Guys.”  

Fahl is still quite proud of that album, though she thinks it may have been too eclectic for its own good — “it confused people thinking it would be the third October Project album that was never made.” 

That contract ended due to a record company shakeup — and Fahl, at loose ends, decided on an ambitious project, an album covering and reinterpreting the classic Pink Floyd album “Dark Side of the Moon.” “Because I loved it so much, and felt I had something very personal to say about it,” she said. Produced by Syracuse-based musician Mark Doyle —who produced the latest album and is in her touring band — “From the Dark Side of the Moon” would go unreleased for several years; the label that was to release it went under before it saw the light of day. (The Floyd connection continues; the new disc includes a cover of “Comfortably Numb” from “The Wall.”) 

Subsequent albums included “Love and Gravity” (2014), “Mary Fahl Live at The Mauch Chunk Opera House” (also 2014), the seasonal album “Winter Songs and Carols” (2019) and the new album.

Thematically, many of Fahl’s compositions — such as “Gravity (Move Mountains, Turn Rivers Around)” or “Like Johnny Loved June” -- focus on a love that’s hard-fought-for and hard-won, love that requires quite a bit of living to realize. “I’m really good at writing a hard-won love song — I never write 'poor-me' love songs,” she said. “I like that kind of thing, hard-won love.”  

And while she loves artists like Joni Mitchell (“Both Sides Now” is a frequent cover), one thing she’s not is a confessional songwriter. “I don’t like to harvest my present personal life for material,” she said. “I’m a great observer of people’s lives, and I notice that when singer-songwriters do that, they don’t stay married for very long!” 

Instead, she said what she tries to do is present an uplifting. experience for listeners in an age filled with tension and loss — if they’re going to pay good money on a concert, she wants to give them something positive. 

“I just want to bring people back to recognizing what’s wonderful about being a human … I want them to leave feeling up,” Fahl said. “People are strapped for cash; I feel like it’s my duty as an artist to uplift them, give them everything I have as a human.” 

If you go:

Mary Fahl's Canandaigua concert is at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 1, at Fort Hill Performing Arts Center, 20 Fort Hill Ave., Canandaigua, co-sponsored by Fort Hill and Fanatics Pub in Lima. Tickets are $35 orchestra and $45 mezzanine and are available at the box office and at fhpac.org.