The Thunder and The Bay 2024

Toronto singer/songwriter Lori Cullen adds to an acclaimed catalog with her ninth album “The Thunder and The Bay”. Known for fusing jazz, folk, bossa, and orch-pop flavours into a uniquely personal hybrid, the eleven new songs expand the sonic palette with contemporary electronica. The juxtaposition of EDM oriented beats with Lori’s crystalline voice and her idiosyncratic melodic sensibility results in a refreshingly rich and modern soundscape.

The material was co-written and produced with James de Pinho AKA Beta One whose roots are in the electronic dance music world. Writing and recording the songs simultaneously, Lori and James lived a close collaboration where the pair’s creative synergy took them to musical places they hadn’t gone to before. Adding an organic touch are notable Toronto players Rich Brown on bass, Kevin Fox on cello, Thom Gill and Kurt Swinghammer on guitars, and William Sperandei on trumpet. Lori’s signature stacked harmonies and complex interweaving backing parts create a choir that sings of a trip of self-discovery.

“When you leave your home and what you know, you become yourself in a different way”. She “imagined a trip due North where the further you go the more you want to keep going, where whatever you can dream up could actually happen”.

Inside this trip to the archetypal North of our imaginations you’ll feel an ardent affection for travelling through Ontario’s forests, swimming its waters and imagining its wilds; a founding creative force for both James’ production and Lori’s lyrics and delivery. Inspired by the stunningly dramatic environment of Thunder Bay, Ontario on a recent tour, Lori responded with an album that unexpectedly combines the poetic approach of the singer/songwriter tradition, a harmonic sensibility informed by jazz, and the creative foundation of an electronic pulse, merging together as The Thunder and The Bay.

Biography

Unforced, unfiltered and exceptionally intimate, Lori Cullen's voice has been called “one of the purest of a generation”. She is a searingly direct and authentically driven artist and in her eight albums she’s taken chances every time.

A child of suburbia Lori wasn’t the kid who sang into her hairbrush. “I had no plan”, she says simply, of her complicated childhood in Mississauga, Ontario. "My thoughts were really to just survive.”  As a teen Lori's musicality was stirring, and to her surprise in her nineteenth year she accessed something she didn’t know was missing: her voice, and it helped her to find her way to her people and her place.

In Lori's early 20’s she began travelling weekly to downtown Toronto to play the world of coffee-shop folk. At open stages new friends came naturally to her, and living at last in a musical community, her career started to move. She wrote, collaborated, experimented and promoted herself with DIY cassettes and CDs. She began working with trusted accompanists, put down her guitar and seamlessly drifted into the vocal jazz world where she earned a Juno nomination for album Calling for Rain. Here in this new genre she kept her trademark honesty very close. She toured in soft seat theatres across Canada winning over critics and fans alike. Around this time Owen Pallet of Final Fantasy asked Lori to contribute her distinctive vocals to his album He Poos Clouds that won the very first Polaris Prize.

In 2008 Cullen recorded Buttercup Bugle. Mostly original compositions co-produced and arranged by Chris Dedrick, the mastermind behind the legendary 60’s Sunshine Pop vocal group Free Design, the album draws on jazz, easy listening, orchestral pop and acoustic folk and initiated a licensing deal with Japanese label Nature Bliss.

Lori's 2011’s album That Certain Chartreuse is a satisfyingly diverse selection of covers by artists from Gordon Lightfoot to King Crimson. This record prompted jazz vocal giant Kurt Elling to announce in an interview that she was "one of his favourite new singers”.

By this time Lori was physically and emotionally consumed by new motherhood. Sensing she needed firm collaborators, friend Ron Sexsmith and partner Kurt Swinghammer joined her to co-write new material for the critically acclaimed album Sexsmith Swinghammer Songs. UK’s Rawcus Magazine wrote, "This wonderful, unexpected jazz/folk album has sneaked its way into contention for one of the best albums of the year.” 

Picking up her guitar Lori's latest offering Blood Wonder is a collection of ten original songs and includes two co-writes with friends Ron Sexsmith and Jennifer Foster. Lovingly produced by dear friend Chris Gartner with a core band of Gartner, Tom Gill and Steven Foster, most of the music was recorded as a live ensemble. Added flourishes, harmonies, and some extra-sweet strings from Grammy-nominated Drew Jurecka (Dua Lipa), animates the lush and original sound of the album.

In 2022 The songs on BLOOD WONDER tell of Lori's intimate journey of motherhood; of her longing to be a mother, the loss of failed pregnancies, the pain of a stillbirth, the birth of her son and the joy and love motherhood now brings. “Parenthood, making babies, is risky business, none of it is easy.  In the darkest time the only thing that could bring me out was music. Turning towards it gave me the kind of release I needed to carry on and keep trying.” 

PRESS QUOTES

“an audiophile’s dream, and this wonderful, unexpected jazz/folk album has sneaked its way into contention for one of the best albums of the year”
Rawcus Magazine (UK)

“These sensual, swinging and sashaying songs provide peasure-centre-assailing treats for any season”
Uncut Magazine- UK

“Lori has a perfect voice, the perfect foil for Sexsmith's deceptively simple words, and Swinghammer's melodic architecture” 
Paul Myers, Music writer- US

Lori Cullen has one of the purest voices in a generation.
Once you’ve heard her, you’ll recognize that she has more than enough talent to become the next premier interpreter of our time.”-Jeffery Morgan- Metro Times Detroit

“If music had the power to reduce stress, this would be the album to do it… Lori Cullen’s effort could add atmosphere to a construction site. A true artist who has created an important work of contemporary Canadian music.”
Penguin Eggs

“Listened to a lot of great music this year, but nothing moved me more than Lori Cullen’s CD, Calling for Rain”
John Stewart- Mississauga News

“Here’s a singer you should have heard by now. She’s already known among cognoscenti in her native Canada for her ability to reinvent pop songs in unexpected ways. (In addition to the Gordon Lightfoot composition suggested above, do yourself a favor and check out Cullen’s version of the Bee Gees’ “Emotion” on the same record. Very clever, indeed.) Cullen also has great taste when it comes to new pieces, writing some herself and relying on her Canadian bandmates for others.
I can’t wait to hear more of this lovely singer.”
Grammy award winning Jazz singer Kurt Elling