SUE WINDOVER’S GIFT IS IN FULL FLOWER,
Sue Windover likes to keep things real.
On the back of the sleeve for her latest album “Park Your Boots,” the fifth song, “Manitoba Moon,” has an arrow indicating it should be fourth on the list — after the song “Rattlesnake” and before the song “Good Old Days.”
“I just wanted to do the right song order. This is how I work,” notes Windover. “That is the real paper. I did not want it typed out perfectly,” she says.
Music was always a central part of Windover’s life. She grew up in Hespeler and her dad played harmonica and her brothers played piano and drums. Singing always came naturally. She began performing folk songs in the early ’80s with a fourpiece band called Some People’s Children which also included her older brother on the drums. They performed at pubs and weddings throughout Waterloo Region. Then she stopped.
“I ran away from my gift,” she admits. “I thought, ‘I am done. This is no fun anymore.’ So I bailed on it.”
Summerville Nurseries in Alliston was looking for counter help. “My father always gardened, and it was just something that we did ... part of our life. I took some extra work with the company and thought, ‘Oh my God, I love plants!’ And then it became a passion,” she says. “I used to joke about it. I would read the gardening encyclopedia like a novel.”
Windover ended up running the garden centre at White Rose in Cambridge for a number of years.
Her return to music was marked by her 2004 debut/personal diary/catharsis “Trial by Fire” which received local airplay in addition to the U.K. and the U.S.
In 2006, Windover was commissioned to write the ballad “My Way Home” for the Hespeler Reunion. When Windover needed a musician to fill in, veteran player Sandy MacDonald stepped up to help. Their harmonies and easygoing stage rapport was a hit with the audience, but that was not the first time Windover had seen MacDonald.
“I think Sandy started playing professionally when he was 16,” she says. “When I was 16 I was playing in a garage band,” she says.
“There was an event at Churchill Park. I think it was an Easter or daylight-saving time weekend,” she recalls. “Sandy was there too. It was funny because we did not know each other at all. Years later comparing notes, we found out we both gigged at that event. Kind of funny,” she notes, adding
the duo has now been playing together for many years.
Her 2011 EP, “Four Days in Mill Valley,” was produced by acclaimed San Francisco songwriter/producer/ multi-instrumentalist Scott Mathews and musician/engineer Tom Luekens who she found in a songwriter’s marketing book.
At first, working with them was not easy, and Windover’s songs almost got overlooked. “But Scott and I maintained a little back and forth every now and again,” says Windover, adding she “pushed hard” to have her work heard.
Windover eventually recorded two songs with Mathews and left another 13 to 14 song samples with him including her stirring original, “Harbour My Heart,” based on the highly publicized murder case of California’s Laci Peterson.
“She was pregnant and missing,” says Windover. “I was rivetted to that mess because I had a young son and I could not understand for the life of me how any of this could ever have happened,” she notes. “My kid was very small and this was heartbreaking to me. This blew my circuits, so I wrote that song.”
Mathews liked several of Windover’s songs including “Harbour My Heart” which was recorded at his famed TikiTown Studios in San Francisco.
“I was just over the moon because being able to sing that song where it happened was profound,” she says. “It was like it was something that had to happen and it did. That for me was amazing,” she adds.
Her latest album “Park My Boots” showcases Windover with an impressive musical supporting cast including The Weber Brothers and Sandy MacDonald on classical guitar.
Windover’s solid roots-music sound is nuanced with the emotional insight of singer-songwriting icons like Carole King, James Taylor, Ian and Sylvia, and Gordon Lightfoot. But it’s mixed with a titch of country singer Terri Clark and folk veteran Laura Smith.
She says the “Boots” songs span four or five years, from ballads of lost love like “Manitoba Moon,” and come-here/goaway ditty “Giddy Up Go!” to take-love-forgranted tune “When I Denied You,” and a swing music ode/tribute to her late father, “When Your Feet Carried Me.”
Windover is now in a “writing zone” with several songs already in postproduction.
“I have written five new songs in the last month. I wake up with the songs — it is like they have been working all night,” she says, adding she is working on several different projects including a long-awaited album with Sandy MacDonald.
“People keep asking us about this,” she says. “Sandy has ‘Mother West Wind’s Animal Friends.’ And I did a song duet on that album called ‘October Blues’ written by Sandy and his wife. “I love to sing that song.”