The Angela Wrigley Trio gets messy and embraces imperfections with sophomore album​on February 17, 2025 at 1:31 pm

When listening to the Angela Wrigley Trio’s new EP, “messy” is not the first word that springs to mind.

The Calgary jazz group offers four songs: a sultry, stripped-down arrangement of Canadian bandleader Chelsea McBride’s big-band composition Something Simple, a slinky cover of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean with allusions to Miles Davis’s All Blues, a haunting take on the standard If I Should Lose You and a Wrigley original called Get Out.

Yes, there is some improvisation, but it’s hardly a flurry of free-jazz cacophony. Not unlike the trio’s 2021 debut album, You Don’t Know What Love Is, it all sounds very elegant. But it’s all relative. Wrigley says there was sound reasoning to name the EP Messy, both musically and personally.

“Since the release of You Don’t Know What Love Is, we’ve all grown a lot both personally and together as a group,” says Wrigley. “We really wanted to capture that growth. We went into the studio with the mindset of trying to embrace imperfections, being a little bit more vulnerable and a little more in the moment and letting the music be more improvisational. That was the concept of Messy in connection to the songs, just that idea that it’s OK to not be perfect in our playing, it’s OK to not be perfect as people.”

“That can come through anywhere in life: Your day-to-day life, in love or in music. It’s OK to be messy. That’s how growth happens.”

This makes for a good segue to discussing the lone original on the album. Get Out is a soulful but defiant kiss-off that the trio calls their “angry break-up song.” Wrigley wrote it while she was going through a divorce.

“It’s a bit of a deviation from my usual sad songs, but it was fun to put a lot of energy into,” she says.

Recorded with producer Scott Morin at OCL Studios outside of Calgary, the only possible criticism that could be levelled at Messy is that it’s too short. The trio – which also includes drummer Dave Lake and bassist Derek Stoll – took more than three years to follow up You Don’t Know What Love Is, which itself came after the band had been playing together for nearly four years. The album was well-received for its mix of polished standards from the Great American Songbook, like-minded originals and jazzed-up covers of rock songs such as Drive by Incubus and Chris Cornell’s James Bond theme You Know My Name. But Wrigley said she found recording and releasing the album overwhelming, feelings that gained greater clarity when she was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in 2022.

“Following that release I was feeling exhausted and overwhelmed and it led me on a bit of a personal mental-health journey,” she says. “Through that journey, I was diagnosed with ADHD, which is a pretty late-in-life diagnosis but it was really a revelation for me. It helped me understand things about myself that I had struggled with a lot that I had thought were inherent flaws. Through that journey, I was able to understand the way my brain works better and access the gifts that also come along with ADHD as well as processing the struggles of that. Things like how impulsivity is not always bad decision-making, it’s also what gives me creativity and passion and how my inattention isn’t just scattered thoughts and losing my things and my house being kind of a mess. It’s also my inspiration and gives me ideas and what drives me to want to do things that haven’t been done before, especially in music. That is a personal connection to me with messy and the concept of imperfection.”