In With the New: Phantom finds her footing as a sonic storyteller

As reflected by her detail-rich songs, Claris Figueira has something of a natural gift for storytelling. To illustrate this, start with “Irene” where, over spectral neon-glow guitars, the singer creates a Polaroid-perfect title character with lines like “Cigarette in hand and your IV stand/Dressed up in the shirt that you wore to the Stones” and “You’re the last woman alive in the suburbs/Dancing under your kitchen light”.

“I went out to a dive bar in Nanaimo, and I was kind of writing while I was there because it felt like the right environment,” Figueira explains, speaking to the Straight from Montreal. “I wasn’t writing the song—more details about this person who ended up in the song. Strangely, there was a reggaeton dance night happening with a whole band with all these older people there. I looked out onto the dancefloor at one point, and there was this older woman with really big, platinum, poofed-up hair. She was salsa-dancing with someone on the dance floor. And I was like, ‘That’s Irene!’ ”

Raised in Vancouver, Figueira is currently bouncing between the West Coast and Montreal, writing songs under the name Phantom. To date, her recorded output consists of a handful of tracks released on streaming platforms, with a debut EP planned for later this year. Scan the credits on her Bandcamp page, and it becomes clear the singer-songwriter has some heavy hitters in her corner.

Vancouver Americana-soul alchemist Frazey Ford is a major fan-girl, coproducing both “Irene” and the slow-dance country-noir stunner “Get It Right”, where Figueira parks herself at the same lonely end of the bar as the ghost of Patsy Cline.

And Celebrated West Coast producer Howard Redekopp, who’s worked with acts including Dear Rouge, Tegan & Sara, Mother Mother, and Hannah Georgas, produced her first recording, the incandescent folk confessional “Punchline”.

Now in her early 30s, Figueira has written songs since her teens, embracing the idea of using art to work through things when the dark thoughts take over. She notes with a laugh that the inspiration for “Punchline”—consisting largely of rattled-off lines such as “Like a straight-to-VHS version of your life/Like reversing down the freeway at night/Like smiling when a man on the street tells you to smile”—sprung from a visit to her therapist.

“The song was kind of a response to the ‘How does that make you feel?’ question,” Figueira shares. “So I wrote the whole song like that. Like describing how it feels to be depressed because I was struggling with depression at the time. My therapist was like, ‘You use humour as a defence mechanism.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’ll show you, Barbara!’ No shade to her, because she was also like ‘Why don’t you just make art if that’s what makes you happy?’ And she had a point.”

Figueira had busked in university, playing Fleetwood Mac and Joni Mitchell songs at farmers’ markets while studying in Halifax. Performing her own material live, however, was terrifying. But while living in Nanaimo a couple of years back, she found the music community to be supportive and uplifting. That led to a series of fortunate coincidences that helped launch her career as Phantom.

One of her first shows was at a friend’s shop, where she was more than a little freaked out, even though she was only playing for 10 people. Unbeknownst to her, one of the attendees was Redekopp.

“He came up to me, and I said something like, ‘I don’t really do this—I’m just playing this one show,’ ” Figueira recalls. “He was like, ‘What do you mean you don’t do this? You should be recording. You know I have a studio right across the street from you right? You should come over and we’ll do some demos.’ ”

The more she played around Nanaimo, the more shows she was asked to play. A few months after meeting Redekopp she was booked for a gig, only realizing she was headlining a couple of hours beforehand.

“I was thinking of covers I could maybe play,” Figueira recalls. “When I busked in Halifax, I would play this song by Frazey Ford called ‘Done’—one of her famous songs—and I thought ‘Maybe I could do that.’ So I was practising it, and then I get to the show which was at this little cafe, and Frazey was sitting in the audience. ‘I was like ‘Oh, I guess I’m not playing that today.’

“I didn’t know her, but I’d seen her play in Vancouver before, because I’m a huge fan” she continues. “She came up to me afterwards and said, “I really loved your show and music.’ We ended up exchanging numbers and she offered to have a coffee with me and talk about music. Then, back in Vancouver, we became friends, and she asked me to do some recording with her.”

While Figueira will return to Vancouver later this spring, she admits that Montreal has also got its hooks into her, with the city’s vibrancy and energy inspirational, and its rent cheap. As one might expect, she has a great story of when, a decade ago, she first moved to the hometown of Leonard Cohen, Wolf Parade, and Arcade Fire.

“This really weird thing happened where I was in Tofino—I’d quit my job and was going to head to Montreal for the last bit of the summer,” Figueira says. “I was at Jack’s Pub in Tofino, going, ‘Should I get a flight back to Montreal?’, when this school bus pulled up. It was full of Italian folk musicians who were all driving back to Montreal the next day. Jack’s Pub was closing, with all these people standing outside, and the door to the bus opened with the Italian musicians playing.

“So everyone gets on the school bus,” she continues, “and it starts driving down the highway. They were all from Sorrento, and they were playing pizzica and tarantella. It was amazing, so I started talking to them, and asked if they had room for me on the bus. They were like ‘Yeah! It’s a school bus!’ ”

There’s more to the story, including a roadside breakdown, a friendly trucker hauling a motherlode of baloney, and a Winnipeg character named Big Dan who had just happened to have a dusty and neglected school bus he was happy to gift a bunch of Italian folk musicians.

Maybe not surprisingly given her eye for detail, Figueira always wanted to be a writer. But she’s glad that she’s found music, even if it took her a while.

“I definitely needed some encouragement from outside,” she says, noting that those who’ve championed her—Ford, Redekopp, and others—​have changed the course of her life. “In some ways, both with writing and music, I wish that I’d put myself out there earlier. For some reason I was always afraid people would not like it, and that if there were hard criticisms, it would lead to self-doubt, which I already have.

“But the opposite happened,” Figueira concludes. “It never occurred to me that I’d get such positive feedback, and how motivating and helpful that would be in getting me to do more. It’s been really, really fun to where I don’t know why I kept this secreted away for so long.”

I’m Your Fan: Frazey Ford

“I randomly caught Phantom playing a short set at the Vault in Nanaimo a couple summers ago and was completely mesmerized. It was that quality of the air shifting in the room, and something about their writing and sound. It had an almost modern Joni Mitchell vibe. I introduced myself and we became friends. Last summer we co-produced and few of their songs along with John Raham at Afterlife Studios.”