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Magic pie
Toronto-based singer-songwriter seeks enlightenment through prayer, travel and pudding.
By Victoria Segal.
Healing hands: Shirley Hurt, AKA Sophia Ruby Katz, lovingly makes sweet and sharp songs.
Shirley Hurt
★★★★
Shirley Hurt
MELODIC. CD/DL/LP
“WHEN YOU met me/I was really going through it,” sings Sophia Ruby Katz on Charioteer, a meditation on love, reincarnation and horses that forms one of her debut album’s more curious extended musical metaphors. The myster y of what it is exactly that the Canadian singer-songwriter is going through lies under these songs, their turmoil rendered in oblique strokes and opaque arrangements, any painful glare filtered through her smoked-glass, Bridget St John voice. It makes sense that she should have cloaked herself in such an enigmatic, ambiguous name as Shirley Hurt – part variety bill headliner, part wounded Ever ywoman.