Your music honours the lineage of country music
- both American and Canadian. Who were the first country music artists
you loved?
Your voice sounds like it was made for country
music, but did you ever flirt with other genres?
Thanks! I have always fancied myself a country
singer; others have designated what
I do as folk or as indie - whatever that means! When I was young I played
in punk bands. It's all music and
I do love it all, but country just
seems to fit me better than everything else.
Unlike a lot of traditional country music, most
of your songs are upbeat - does making music make you happy?
I really want
to give people a sense of hope in my songs. I'm a pretty positive person
overall and I want my songs to reflect that positivity.
You hail from the prairies and, of course,
there's another well-known prairies artist who got her start in country music:
kd lang. How much of a country music culture is there in the prairie
provinces? And in Canada in general?
The music
culture in the Canadian Prairies is rich!
Country music especially. Most of the prairies are relatively
unpopulated. Cultures of farming and
work seem to bring out songwriters and songs that want to tell those
stories.
Your music has a real sense of place - almost
like you're standing on a street corner telling stories to passers-by. Are
you in a particular kind of mindset when you record, to evoke that sense of
place?
I work hard at
writing good narrative. It truly
is difficult for me to get the story to
come out right in the studio. I
have to try and imagine people are listening;
I have to try and convince them to keep listening. I try and keep the studio
lighting dim and I try to take over the studio with things that make me
comfortable. I always try and have family around, good food and a team that
want to make a good record as much as I do.
There's always a balance to be struck between
being on the road, playing for your audience, and then writing new songs for
that audience. Are you able to write on the road or do you need time on
your own for that?
I do write
while I'm on the road, but I don't know that I get anything good out. I see
writing as a practice. Something I have to try and do it every day regardless
of how I feel about it. So yeah,
I'm always writing, but my best songs are
writing while at home when I have the space to digest and reflect on
everything. When things slow down it seems easier to get my ideas on paper.
You work with Bill Western as your steel player,
and both of you produced Prairieography - how did that relationship come
about?
I've been
friends with Bill for at least 6 years now. He was the only pedal steel player I
had heard of living in Winnipeg, where I used to live, so I sought him out
to play some shows with me here and there. Since that first show, I've
grown to respect him as a person and I've fallen in love with his playing. I
think he really knows how to serve the song.
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