band of the month

Passing on the grand version.

The first song she wrote was about a rocket ship. She was in first grade, home from a vacation Bible school where the theme that week was space, and she sang it to her dog, Winston. She will not sing it again. But she remembers writing it, and she never really stopped.

By high school it was serious. She majored in classical guitar at a performing arts school, and somewhere between learning new chords and journaling her way through being a teenager, the two things fused. A shape on the guitar would suggest a melody. The melody would pull a line out of whatever she had been writing down. That is still more or less how it works.

She was also posting songs to YouTube then, trying to write like Orla Gartland. One went, "Think of me, I'm alone too. Think of me, I'm thinking of you." She says it was about being there for people, about her friends and her community.

What comes out she files under existential indie-folk.

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The songs bear the label out. "Hazel Eyed Lover in Patagonia" opens with someone worn out on trying to be a rockstar, who wants instead to be where the dirt and the rocks are, small again. From there it inhabits the whole backpacker-romantic cliché and means it: she learns to backpack off a YouTube video, packs a tent, and hits the road after something realer than the life she left. She falls for a stranger on a trail, in her words, like instant mashed potatoes, and starts saving for a sprinter van. The touches are knowing, but the search under them is sincere, a young person after the simple, wholesome, still-adventurous life. It is not the small consolation it pretends to be.

"Press 3" comes at the same question from the other side, staging the end of a life as an automated phone survey: rate your experience one to ten, did you do everything you meant to, press two to hear how the world ends. The customer-service framing is the joke and the method at once, a way to ask the largest question there is, whether a life added up, in the flattest language she can find. Both songs pass on the grand version of things. So does she.

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She lives in Nashville now, close to eight years, though she is from Las Vegas. She met Tom there, in school. He studied commercial bass; she studied songwriting and music business. They were dating before she asked him to play with her, which she is careful to point out is the less complicated order of operations.

Tom tours with another artist most of the year, so their schedules rarely line up. This run is the first long one they have done together. He plays bass on her records. Here he is on guitar.

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They came up to Alberta in February, from the desert, into the coldest weather either of them had felt. Seven shows in a little under two weeks: folk clubs, house concerts, listening rooms. Four hundred people the first night at the New Moon Folk Club. A sold-out agricultural society hall a few nights later. A bookstore in Lethbridge called Analog Books.

It is her second time through Edmonton, and the difference shows. Some of the same faces. A show with Jed and the Valentine, old friends of hers. The sense, she says, of being welcomed into something rather than passing through it. Her favourite part of touring is getting to try on a different corner of the world for the length of one night.

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She talks about success like something she has to keep redefining before it turns into the next thing. The version she had in high school, discovering all of it for the first time, only happens once. So does this one. The work is staying inside the phase you are in while still looking ahead.

What she is sure of is that no one hands you permission. There is no record deal that turns you into a touring musician, no badge someone pins on. If you want to write songs, you write songs. If you want to tour, you get in the car. She has driven from Montana to play British Columbia and Alberta before. Most of it, she says, you can bootstrap.

She won the New Folk competition at Kerrville. Every chair turned for her on The Voice. She still keeps a spreadsheet of goals in Nashville and opens it the day she gets home.

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The community was in the songs first. Now she is making it literal, a songwriting community on Substack, a book club inside it, everyone reading the same novel and writing songs about it. She wants it to be more than come watch me sing. The best advice she has for a younger artist is smaller and more practical than it sounds: start your email list now. Social media may not last. Email, she figures, is forever.

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The EP she was selling on CD that winter, This Side of the Sun, is out now. More solo tours are booked.

The session is three songs: Matador, Press 3, and Hazel Eyed Lover in Patagonia, which she recorded with Jed and the Valentine. A warm room in the coldest part of the winter, a long way from home. Then the trip back to Nashville. She said her songwriter cup was full.