Shari Ulrich – One Step Ahead

Funny how you can know a name but not know anything about the artist. Shari Ulrich is one of those artists who just skirted on the fringes of real success here in Canada. That sort of reads as a dismissive shot, but it's not.

Many years ago I was a camp counsellor for a couple of summers and one of my fellow "shapers of future minds" was Rick Scott's son who was incredibly funny and we had a hoot over those two summer camps. Anyway I can't remember how it came up that he was Rick's son, most likely because I fancied myself a songwriter who could song about food and animals ... yeah, whatever you're conjuring in your mind's eye it's even worse. Why am I telling you this? I have no idea, but it's one of those things that came to mind when I was sitting here listening to One Step Ahead.

Regardless, Shari was a member of the Pied Pumpkin that was apparently a biggish deal in the early '70s, and then she, along with Valdy, was a member of  The Hometown Band, a band I sort of knew of, but knew nothing about other than they were Valdy's backing band for a while.

This is going somewhere, really, just bear with me. In the late '90s I got a chance to work at United Way in Vancouver and over a 14 week period I was out and about coordinating workplace campaigns. It was an awesome experience. As part of my toolkit I have a VHS cassette that showcased the work being done in the community, and the soundtrack to the video was provided by none other than Shari Ulrich. The song she had provided, "Hand of a Hero" was a surprisingly (to me at any rate) awesome pop song that I heard over and over and over, and it never wore thin.

I became a fan through that song. I was a fan with no other point of reference but I considered myself a fan nonetheless.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I find in the bins her 1981 release One Step Ahead, and I snapped it up. Reading the back jacket revealed a local who's who of the best players you could imagine. From Chilliwack alumni - Bill Henderson, Ab Bryant, and Claire Lawrence (who was also in Home Town Band) to drummer Marc La France and from Doucette guitarist Brent Shindel and Robbie King on organ. 

Honestly she had me before I read the credits. After a careful cleaning I put the album on, and it was pop magic. There was just enough edge here and there to qualify as a pop / rock album. It was also very much a late '70s album that would be right at home with albums by Christopher Cross, and David Roberts. Again, not a shot, I love this stuff.

The album was also produced by Claire Lawrence, and this is a great sounding record. It pushes a lot of my happy buttons, which I always find fun considering my love for harder guitar oriented rock. To those who aren't as enamoured with shiny pop songs, one could argue the album while sounding great is also fairly generic and seemed to be deliberately crafted to be commercially accessible.

I have a counter to that as well. So?

This was her second album for A&M as she had dropped her debut album Long Nights a year earlier and then in 1982 she'd move to MCA and release Talk Around Town. Then she'd sort of go dark for the better part of a decade.

Those early '80s albums seem to have be kept in the vaults which sadly seems to be a common theme for so many artists. Which is too bad.

This was a fun find, and it was as much fun listening to as it was to unravel the the interconnected threads of the various contributors on the album to see who was who.