Wide Cut Weekend kicks off Thursday
Little Miss Higgins puts her son front and centre on latest record
It doesn’t take long into an interview with Little Miss Higgins to discover the life-changer that had an immediate impact on her music career a few years back. He makes his presence known. The singer-songwriter has left her rural property in Manitoba to get better reception for a phone interview with Postmedia. Her two-year-old son Joe is in tow, excitedly commenting on the seemingly endless parade of tractors and other farm machinery that he spots as mom talks about her sixth record, My Home, My Heart.
“It’s interesting being a mother and a musician; trying to do it all and raise a toddler at the same time,” she says. “When he was born and the first two years of his life I had very little time to sit and write. But I was like ‘I have to do something.’ I decided I’ll get back in the saddle and do another album. I can do that, right?”
Joe is a direct presence on the record. The rollicking, trumpet-sweetened Baby in My Belly is a pretty obvious reference, as is Little Joe Lullaby, a gliding acoustic-blues number that begins with the words “You got raccoons on your blanket, you got robots on your suit. You call out when you’re lonely and don’t know what to do.”
“I had a few little bits of pieces of songs here and there,” Higgins says. “Even with Joe, I was making things up at the moment. Because, for some reason, when you’re a mom and you have a crying baby you can’t think of a single song to sing. Even though there are millions of songs in the world, I can’t think of a song at that moment. So I just start making things up.”
The child had a more indirect influence as well. The songwriter, who was born Jolene Higgins, decided she needed a different headspace to continue writing. So, in March, she returned to Brooks, where she was born but left with her family two years later to live in Kansas. Back home in Alberta at her mother’s place, she finished penning the songs on the record while her mom spent time with Little Joe.
“I bunkered down and just wrote,” she says. “At first I said ‘I’m going to do a song a day!’ Yeah, right. But I did put my head down and just worked.”
The resulting album, her first since 2013’s Bison Ranch Recording Sessions, continues the singer’s fascination with old-timey music. It’s an infectious cocktail of country-blues, jazz and folk that sounds immediately timeless, from the jaunty and funny Full Contact Sport, to the gentle title track and strolling country-blues of Radville (Revisited).
She credits her first real introduction to music to her father, who brought home a piano when she was four. She came of age in the 1980s and ’90s, listening to that era’s pop music, but always found herself drawn to older sounds.
“I grew up playing classical piano and watching musicals and I watched the Muppet Show, which was filled with awesome and fantastic music of all the genres and time periods,” she says. “But I really loved the (older style of music). I loved that you could hear the notes. I loved the chord progressions. It also fit with my voice. When I started playing guitar, I was playing more folk stuff and listening to stuff from the ’60s and ’70s. And then I went backwards from there. Well, what were these people listening to? And what were they listening to? I think I’m a bit of a musical anthropologist.”
This interest in the history of roots music makes Higgins a perfect candidate for Wide Cut Weekend, a music festival dedicated to country and folk that will take over various venues in Calgary from Thursday to Saturday.
These days, Higgins tours lightly, backed by a bassist and multi-instrumentalist. And, in the ultimate mom move, travels by minivan.
“My full band seems to all be becoming fathers at the same time and realizing they have to help pay the bills,” says Higgins with a laugh. “So it’s getting harder and harder to tour. It’s also easier for me to not have to take a huge band and organize. It’s easier for me if I can say ‘let’s jump in the minivan and go.’ ”