REINVENTING HERSELF
Guitarist Liona Boyd discovers encore career as singer-songwriter.
Liona Boyd has been called the first lady of the guitar for her success in popularizing the classical guitar.
With blonde good looks and a lightning-fast technique, she was accorded the attention usually granted pop stars in the 1970s and 1980s.
She toured with singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, recorded an album with Yo-Yo Ma and rock guitarists Eric Clapton and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, played with John Williams and the Boston Pops, racked up five Juno Awards (Canada’s version of the Grammys) and appeared on talk shows and television specials. Along the way, she and former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau engaged in an eightyear affair.
Her fast-lane life came to a screeching halt in 2003, when task-specific focal dystonia — neurological damage due to overuse — stalled the fingers of her right hand, playing havoc with her plucking technique.
Devastated, she left the stage
for six years.
Then she realized she had a choice. She could reinvent herself as something other than a virtuoso guitarist.
“It was the only way I could keep music in my life,” she said. “I could simplify my technique and do something crazy — like singing.”
Boyd, who has divided her time between her hometown of Toronto and Palm Beach since 2011, will perform a concert of her own music with singer-guitarist Andrew Dolson at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse in West Palm Beach. She’s performed at the Rinker twice, in 1996 and 1997.
On Wednesday, she’ll be joined for three songs by singers from the Young Singers of the Palm Beaches. The concert also will feature her songs about Canada, a tribute song to Lightfoot, her arrangements of Catalan folk melodies and other songs.
Boyd, 68, cut her first album featuring her singing and guitar-playing — “Liona Boyd Sings Songs of Love” — in 2009. She’s made four more recordings featuring her own songs and arrangements, including her most recent, “No Remedy for Love,” released last year. Her second memoir, also titled “No Remedy for Love,” came out in August.
The concert at the Kravis Center is her first in the United States for years. She’s been performing mainly in Canada. She’s cut down on touring, weary of the strain of travel.
She no longer mourns the loss of her awesome technique or her globe-trotting career. In a way, she’s thankful for the affliction that put a stop to it.
“If it hadn’t been for that I’d still be playing with symphonies and living a stressful life instead of singing my own songs,” she said. “I’ll never be Renee Fleming. I have an untrained, simple, folksy voice, but people appreciate my songs.”
One her biggest fans is Britain’s Prince Philip, her pen pal for 30 years. She met him when she was with Trudeau.
When she first moved to Palm Beach, she made the society rounds. She lives a quieter life now.
“She enjoys small things,” said her friend, resident Skira Watson.
She wrote most of the songs and instrumentals for her last four albums at her Palm Beach home, where she’s set up a rudimentary studio to make demo recordings.
“The peaceful, creative feeling that I get here living close to nature with intermittent downpours, crickets singing in the evenings, ocean breezes, beautiful sunsets and sunrises and the distant sound of the night train I can hear from West Palm Beach inspire me to write my songs,” she said.
Yet she has mixed feelings about the town, as is clear from this excerpt from a poem included in her new memoir:
“How much is real, how much pretend
The Donald greets me like a friend
At Mar-a-Lago’s grand events
And fundraisers in floodlit tents.”
But for now, she’s content, and she hopes her story will encourage others not to lose heart when life changes its tune in midsong.