As one half of electro-pop duo Purity Ring, Megan James not only brings her diverse musical talent to the stage, but also some serious design credentials.
Connecting to Megan James on her landline took a few attempts, not because of technical problems but because she was shifting boxes around and didn’t hear the phone ringing. “I just moved across the country, which shouldn’t take a year but it kind of did,” she says.
The country that Megan ‘just’ moved across is her native Canada. Her journey was an almost 4000km reverse pilgrimage from the Nova Scotian port of Halifax where she’d lived for three years, to her hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, where she and Purity Ring bandmate, Corin Roddick, first met as teenagers. Back then, Megan and Corin were making music together as members of the electro-pop band, Gobble Gobble (now Born Gold). At the same time, Corin was starting to produce his own music as a side project, and when he asked Megan to provide vocals for a track he’d been working on, Purity Ring was formed.
The track Ungirthed was released in January 2011, and would be the lead single of Purity Ring’s debut album, Shrines, which dropped in July of the following year. Shrines was followed up by 2015’s Another Eternity, which the duo has spent the past several months touring. When I spoke to Megan she was still buzzing from a week in Tel Aviv, a place that she described as “the end of the world and the centre at the same time. It’s a country that runs on war,” she says, “but that makes for this tight community of people who want for something different. It’s so strong and beautiful, it was a very inspiring experience.”
More recently the band was in New Zealand, treating St Jerome’s Laneway Festival goers to the sensory spectacle that is Purity Ring. Incorporating the use of instruments that the pair designed and built themselves, the show was made all the more magical by a complex lighting arrangement whereby lights suspended from the ceiling changed in time to the music. “We programmed these changes to be very specific to each song, so the whole thing works like an extension of the music,” says Megan. “Like how we imagine the music to look, visually.”
Adding to the show’s visual impact were the clothes that Megan and Corin wore onstage, which Megan made herself. A little bit 70s and a little bit sci-fi, Megan thinks the word “expansive” best encapsulates the band’s aesthetic. It’s thus surprising when she refers to these stage outfits as “uniforms” as opposed to costumes, but she explains that this utilitarian label is in part because they function more like a piece of the set. And they don’t vary much from show to show. “But I’m kind of into that as far as style goes anyway,” says Megan. “If I find an outfit that works, I’ll wear it as long as possible.”
These don’t sound like the words of a woman who bores easily but, according to Megan, she does. She illustrates this point by mentioning she did a one-year fashion course straight out of school because she couldn’t bring herself to commit to four years at university. Not that studying fashion was an out-of-the blue decision – driven by a “crazy desire” for everything in her wardrobe to be homemade, she has always sewn her own clothes and dreamed of selling them. But while Purity Ring commitments have taken priority of late, she confesses that a key reason this business venture is on the backburner is that she can’t get excited about making multiple copies of the same thing. “They’d all have to be different. That’s very key to my mentality,” she says.
One wonders whether this mentality is part of the reason why Purity Ring’s first two albums were created in such dissimilar circumstances. Megan and Corin made their respective contributions to Shrines from different cities, emailing material back and forth. For Another Eternity, Corin would make special trips to Halifax and they’d force themselves to collaborate face-to-face. Megan lets on that when it comes to the next album, the pair will probably take an entirely different approach again. “We feel so strongly about not making the same thing twice,” she says.
With another huge year for Purity Ring, including a gig at Coachella in April, it’s apparent that this next album isn’t a question of if, but when. With Megan not wanting to rush the writing process, it’s clear, too, that launching a clothing line could still be a way off in the future. She is confident, however, that it’ll happen when it happens. “Apart from music, sewing is the one thing I’ll always consistently do and come back to,” she says. “It will always be a part of me – a key identifier in my life.”
