Calgary indie band Woodpigeon recently released their sophomore album, Treasury Library Canada c/w Houndstooth Europa. Band members include, from left, Mikey "Blades" Gratton, Daren Powell, Kenna Burima, Foon Yap, Annalea Sordi-McClure, Aimee-Jo Benoit, Mark Hamilton and Peter Moersch. (Boompa)

If the exponential growth of social media has taught us anything, it’s that we have a primal urge to share our stories. Bite-sized nuggets of 140 characters or less may not be the most effective narrative devices, but even the most inane snippet (“Ate an avocado for lunch”; “Read a news report on penguins”) speaks to our need to document our lives and our hope of making connections with people.

'I can have 10 different emotional catharses a day, and if I feel down about it, I’d rather write a song about it than sit at home and eat pasta.'

—Mark Hamilton, bandleader of Woodpigeon

That storytelling compulsion is what drives Mark Hamilton. He’s the founder and core member of Calgary’s Woodpigeon, a sprawling indie-folk ensemble that creates lush, buoyant songs with intricate arrangements of glockenspiel, ukulele, guitar, keyboards and violin. While Woodpigeon’s sound is engaging, it’s Hamilton’s lyrics that draw you into the heart of these compositions. He delivers his tales in an affecting sigh of a voice that falls somewhere between Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) and Will Oldham – plaintive, pleasantly creaky and frayed around the edges.

“I wanted to be a scriptwriter and a filmmaker, but I realized I tell stories much better this way,” Hamilton says during a recent phone interview. (Incidentally, he’s preparing for a master’s degree in cinema.) “Films never came out the way they were inside my head, and songs do," he says. "I’ve never put out a song that didn’t feel right.

“The difference between the two is that when you get an actor to play a role in a film, there’s always the artifice of acting. If you ask a violinist to play a particular part, that’s exactly what comes out. A layer of distance is removed because they’re not pretending to be something else.”

(Boompa Records)

The singer-songwriter is an obsessive diarist — songs, he says, are just an extension of that. But Woodpigeon’s songs are not unfiltered confessionals; a skilled journalist, Hamilton recognizes the importance of precise language and evocative metaphor to communicate raw emotional truths.

On Woodpigeon’s first album, Songbook (2006), Hamilton couched matters of the heart in self-deprecating analogies. In the sing-songy Death by Ninja (A Love Song), Hamilton imagines training with a sensei to exact revenge on a caddish suitor; A Sad Country Ballad for a Tired Superhero is a twangy tale about failing to live up to one’s potential.

The group’s latest album, Treasury Library Canada c/w Houndstooth Europa, recently made the long list for the 2009 Polaris Music Prize. The songs range from sombre chamber pieces to sprightly piano-driven marches. Hamilton’s writing is more focused here, but the titles (In the Battle of Sun vs. Curtains, Sun Loses and We Sleep Until Noon; In Praise of the West Midlothian Bus Service) are no less irreverent. While the album clocks in at a hefty 24 tracks, each song feels as if it has earned its place.

As it turns out, Treasury Library Canada is just the tip of the iceberg for the ludicrously prolific Hamilton, who already has the next Woodpigeon album (called Die Stadt Muzikanten) in the can and is heading to the studio to record another Woodpigeon record.

“Why do we live in an age where we’re attached to this idea that you have to put out 12 songs every two years?” he muses. “If you’re a filmmaker who makes a film every year – like Woody Allen did in the '70s – it’s not subject to the same questions.”

(Even so, Hamilton sometimes struggles to get things right. Edinburgh, a song on a forthcoming album, took four years to refine — primarily, he claims, because he couldn’t find the proper turns of phrase and harmony to do the subject justice. “It sounds pedantic and stupid,” Hamilton groans, “but that was the first time I got hurt really badly [by love]. It’s named for the city that did that to me.”)

The process of recording Die Stadt Muzikanten was vastly different from past Woodpigeon experiences, largely due to the fact that Hamilton lost a regular job in 2007 and spent virtually every day from November 2007 through March 2008 working with various band members in studios around Calgary.

Woodpigeon perform at the Grand Theatre in Calgary. (Woodpigeon)

“Thank god for severance and E.I.,” he jokes. “I really wanted to have an experience like that, where I was working on something every single day.” The mastered demos for the new album are crisp and commanding, rich full-band affairs that feel like a mighty step forward.

“I’m really drawn to the idea that you need to keep doing the work, and let it develop as you go,” Hamilton says, citing the Kinks’ Ray Davies as a role model. As we talk, he walks over to his vinyl collection and gazes at a stack of Kinks records.

“Look at these dates – two records came out in one year, and they’re both phenomenal. There’s a man who, for 15 years, never stopped.

“I don’t think speed determines the arduousness of the process. There seems to be a lot of pain in 69 Love Songs [the three-album, 69-song collection by the Magnetic Fields]. I mean, I can have 10 different emotional catharses a day, and if I feel down about it, I’d rather write a song about it than sit at home and eat pasta. I just hope my ear continues to work in such a way that I know which songs don’t need to be put out into the world.”

He pauses.

“I have a group of people I love working with right now. I like making songs with them. But I don’t know whether they’ll be around me a year from now. I think a lot of [what drives me] is fear, too. I’m so scared I’ll lose things. And I wonder what it’s like to tour and play songs for three years before you record them. I wonder if you lose your connection with those feelings, with the need to tell those stories.”

Treasury Library Canada c/w Houndstooth Europa is in stores now. Woodpigeon plays the North By Northeast festival in Toronto on June 20.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.