THE DEPTHS OF VULNERABILITY
Rose Cousins broadens the spectrum of St. Patrick’s Day live musical entertainment with a sound decidedly out of step with traditional folk,
Along with all that green beer, St. Patrick’s Day (this Friday) usually offers a good chance to take in live music and that’s the case again this year at various stages in the Edmonton area. Some of it grooves to the Irish or Celtic folk tradition and some doesn’t.
In the latter category, Rose Cousins isn’t planning anything to mark the date when she hits the stage at St. Albert’s Arden Theatre, but her own original songs along with a full band are reason enough to go.
A past visitor to the Folk Fest, a Juno winner and collaborator with some of Canada’s best, the P.E.I.born folksinger has a truly singular sound that’s hard to ignore once you’ve heard the opening moments of Chosen from her new release, Natural Conclusion. It’s her fourth album in 15 years, produced by Grammy-winning American Joe Henry, who has overseen projects for everyone from Solomon Burke to Billy Bragg. Its often stark sound brings moods of striking clarity, highlighting Cousins’ raw, uncluttered tone, bare emotion and thoughtful lyrics.
Already receiving international notices, Natural Conclusion was recorded in Toronto over five days in March 2016 with some Canadian musicians she knew and others that Henry brought with him from L.A. That includes top-drawer talents like David Piltch and Aaron Davis, but they were used sparingly to set her voice off against the silence.
“There’s a new level of vulnerability here for me,” Cousins says. “The writing and the stories are deeper, and there’s a vulnerability to recording live-off-the-floor with some characters I knew and some I didn’t. But if you don’t make yourself vulnerable, you can’t really get everything that is available.”
She was on tour in the U.S. Midwest last week when I reached her, and tracing her background, you might think Cousins is an artistic nomad. Despite past associations with Boston, Nashville, Los Angeles and other centres, she has been officially based in Halifax since she moved there to take a university degree in kinesiology 18 years ago. Photography was another competing career, but we’re lucky she seems to have settled on music.
Cousins started writing songs at the piano around age nine before picking up guitar later. Her latest tunes would fall under the guise of love songs, but labelling them that seems inadequate because they pack so much more.
“There’s nothing simple about a relationship, so the songs are many-layered because that’s what it’s like to have a relationship with another human being. It’s like trying to get through a pile of junk to this dream of a great relationship, but it’s a thing that’s in constant motion, that you have to work at to maintain. That’s not to take the joy out of it, but relationships have uncomfortable parts and those are probably the parts that interest me the most.”
She first me Henry in 2012. A couple of years ago, she reached a point of artistic burnout that left her wondering if she could continue with music, but his participation was one thing that made her want to record again.
“He gets the deep layers in the poetry of a song because he’s also a poet. He gets the esthetic of maintaining the song’s integrity as it was created, so he was great for producing these songs because they’re not all straightforward in structure and he just listens for the magic. He cares about the space around the song as much as the notes being played.”
For her Arden performance at 7:30 p.m., Friday, Cousins plays guitar and piano with four backing players, including pedal steel guitar. Tickets are $35 from the Arden box office (780459-1542) or online from ticketmaster.ca.
ST. PATRICK’S FOLK
If you’re hoping to hear something closer to a jig or a reel this weekend, consider two shows at Sherwood Park’s Festival Place, starting with the awardwinning Irish quintet Goitse (pronounced Go-with-cha), who play there Friday.
Named Irish Group of the Year in several quarters last year, they take their name from the Gaelic greeting “Come here.” Using a mix of fiddle, banjo, guitar, accordion, keyboard, bodhran percussion (including two all-Ireland champions) and the fetching, sweet vocal of Aine McGeeney, they bring new life to the Irish tradition. Goitse first formed as a student collective around Limerick University, but after four albums, the band sports an impressive mix of high-spirited youthful energy, technical expertise and great songs from the history of the Emerald Isle.
Saturday at the same venue it’s time for a return visit from that frenetic son of Cape Breton, Ashley MacIsaac. Remember Sleepy Maggie, the single that helped send his early album Hi How Are You Today to double-platinum sales? In the process, the fiddle sensation helped shake up Canada’s Celtic music scene, all while still in his teens, back in the early 1990s.
With a sound you might call Celtic fusion, he sometimes sported more flash than finesse with the tunes, and his 2003 autobiography, Fiddling With Disaster, offered an admission that popularity had forced him to grow up too soon despite winning three Juno Awards along the way. Given that, the more mature MacIsaac (now 42) has found a greater depth in his playing, performing and musical conceptions, making good on the promise of that rising star. No word yet on exactly what sort of band he’s bringing, though MacIsaac’s latest album FDLER is a duo experiment.
Both shows start at 7:30 p.m. Tickets to Goitse’s show Friday run from $31 to $35, while seats for MacIsaac’s Saturday concert are $37 to $41, and both are available from the Festival Place box office (780449-3378 or at festivalplace.ab.ca).
Note that the Festival Place Sunday concert with The Leahys
is already sold out.