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Frazey Ford sees a darkness.

Her other two bandmates in The Be Good Tanyas do as well.

It’s evident in the music they make — the lonely, mournful sounds that make “Hello Love,” the trio’s most recent album, the audio equivalent of pulling out a box of old photographs, uncorking a bottle of wine and spending a night revisiting the ghosts of past relationships.

It’s bittersweet and achingly beautiful, like the memories such nights evoke. At the same time, Ford told The Daily Times, there has to be a balance — the sad intertwined with the memories of laughter and light and peace — in order to present a complete picture of the human experience through music.

“That’s a fine line for us,” Ford said in a recent phone interview. “Sometimes, you need to hear that darker song in yourself, and you may seek it out when you’re in a darker place so that you have that resonate back to you as a reminder of where you’ve been. But as with any approach to the dark, there’s got to be some beauty; at least enough to sustain being in that place.

“I think that’s what music does — it takes something a little painful and makes you feel the beauty. There’s always beauty in sorrow as well, and I think it’s important to remember that. It’s a constant thing to find that balance between a dark place and a joyful place.”

It’s a line The Be Good Tanyas straddle well. Together with Samantha Parton and Trish Klein, Ford formed the group three albums ago, electrifying audiences with their subtle, earnest approach to such a distinctly American art form — surprising to many, given that the band hails from Vancouver, British Columbia.

According to Ford, however, it’s not so surprising, given her own musical pedigree.
“For me, my mom actually grew up in Nebraska and Colorado, and I have a lot of family that’s all over the South, so for me, the music does come straight out of these similar areas,” she said. “My mom’s ancestors are French-Canadian Irish who traveled down the Missouri River, and the music they made ended up having a very country sound but came out of the French tradition with the fiddle and the accordion.

“I grew up hearing my mom singing a lot of country and really old songs. Nowadays, you can really be influenced by the records your parents listened to, and hearing my mom sing was probably the earliest influence for me. She sang to me while I was in the womb, and when my parents moved to Canada in the ‘60s and ‘70s, they were into the whole hippie and folk scenes.

“When I started writing songs, a lot of it started sounding like this old country sound coming out of me,” she added. “It’s a trip to me, because it’s not something where I would have said I’m a big country fan.”

Sometimes, she feels an ancestral connection to such roots-oriented music; a tie that binds her through generations who came before. She starts to speak of it, hesitates and then laughs, choosing instead to talk about her boyfriend’s recent comparison of her to Dolly Parton.

“My other love is soul music; I love gospel, and my boyfriend and I have an a capella gospel quartet based in the African-American tradition, so he’s used to me singing,” she said. “The other day we were walking down the street, and he turned to me and said, ‘You can really hit that Dolly Parton thing!’ It just cracked me up. All of the sudden, I felt the need to buy gaudy heels.”

She laughs, a warm sound, filled with mirth and light ... a far cry from the lonely, Tom Waits-meets-Bob-Dylan mumbling, shuffling singing style that’s so distinctive to the Be Good Tanyas sound.

It’s that yin-yang thing again — light to darkness and back to the light; from the sorrowful to the joyful; the down-and-out to the uplifting. It’s a balance the band strives for in all that they do, and by every conceivable standard, they succeed admirably.

“I think that for us, we’ve all spent a lot of time going through a lot of pain in our lives, and we keep going back to music as a source of strength and inspiration and to keep on going,” she said. “Through hard lives and tragic stories, music has been there for us. None of us were particularly ambitious, and none of us foresaw a musical career.

“It kind of fell in our laps, and we went with it. I feel like we’ve been gifted an opportunity to share music with people, and I feel like our job is to be real for people and share with them our real feelings. I think that’s our formula for success — the world is full of real people with real struggles who respond to honesty, and that’s what we want to give them.”