QUITTIN’ TIME?
Lindi Ortega was all set to leave country music, but then she fell in love and moved to Calgary
It’s a sobering reminder of the realities of the music industry.
In the past six years, country singer Lindi Ortega has released four critically acclaimed records, toured non-stop, received praise from Rolling Stone and the New York Times and even appeared on the popular ABC series Nashville.
For five years, the Toronto native seemed to be living the dream in Music City as a Canadian expat. She operated outside of Nashville’s star-making mainstream, but that only served to further her reputation as an uncompromising singersongwriter.
Ortega’s profile seemed to grow with each new album, as did her ability to blend the big-voiced jubilance of Dolly Parton with a melancholy that recalled Patsy Cline, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. It was traditionalist twang with a punk-rock punch and everyone seemed to be paying attention.
In 2014, Britain’s Guardian newspaper called her “the fast rising dark star of country and rockabilly.”
However, as Ortega ruefully points out, critical acclaim is great, but it doesn’t pay the rent.
So last year, she sat down to write what she figured would be her last song: a chilling, pianobased farewell she called Final Bow. Burned out from touring, creatively drained and perpetually broke, Ortega didn’t think she had a future in the music business. As distressing as it may seem to her fans, Ortega was thinking about quitting the business and getting a “real job.”
“It is very difficult for an artist who doesn’t operate in the mainstream world to make a living that pays for life’s regular expenses,” Ortega says.
“I really don’t want to come across as ‘woe-is-me.’ There’s a lot of musicians who go through this; I’m not the only one.
“A lot of people don’t talk about it, because there is some sort of allure and romanticism behind the idea that you do what you love for a living and you tour and you get to do all these fun things. That’s great and it’s true. But there is that underside that is not very romantic where, yeah, I bought a carton of eggs and I have to make that last for a week for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
There were other factors. Her contract with Toronto’s Last Gang Records was coming to an end. She was tired of living in Nashville, which was experiencing massive growth that robbed the city of much of the charm Ortega had fallen in love with five years earlier. She didn’t want to sign another record deal if it meant getting back on the endless treadmill of putting out a new album each year, touring incessantly and coming home with no money.
So she drank a bottle of wine and began writing what she figured would be her last song. But this sense of finality did not bring her much peace.
“What kind of job am I going to get? Who am I going to be? All I know how to do is be a musician, that’s all I’ve been for the past 20 years,” she says. “It was just a real coming to terms with genuinely believing I was going to stop making music and do something else. That was meant to be my last song. But everything changed.
“Those are pinnacle and critical moments in life when you think you’re at the end of something. Then you have this wild epiphany. I realized that there was a different way to do things that would make life a little easier for me. It was about striking up a better balance between how hard I was working and living life. I felt my creativity was being stifled a lot. I was just working so hard and didn’t have time to sit and reflect and enjoy things I was experiencing.”
So Ortega opted against re-signing with Last Gang or any other label. She put together a “measly budget” to make her own EP, a stripped-down, four-song collection called Til The Goin’ Gets Gone.
Along with Final Bow and the title track, which both seem to lyrically reflect the career uncertainty Ortega was feeling, she penned What a Girls Gotta Do, a stark lament about economic survival, and covered Townes Van Zandt’s soul-crushingly sad Waiting Around to Die.
When taken together, the EP certainly seems to mine some of the anxiety Ortega was feeling. But at roughly the same time she was writing these songs, she was also falling in love.
In September she met Daniel Huscroft, who plays guitar for Calgary singer-songwriter JJ Shiplett, in Franklin, Tenn. at Johnny Reid’s house.
“JJ came down to do some writing,” Ortega said. “I had no idea he would be bringing his guitar player with him or that I would fall in love with his guitar player and get engaged to him and be living in Calgary.”
That’s right, Ortega is now a Calgarian. In February she left Nashville for Cowtown, where she lives with her fiance.
“One part of my life was really beautiful and lovely and beautiful things were happening and the other part was falling apart,” Ortega says.
“It was so great that it happened the way it did. I think the fact that I had that rock and strength on the other side of it really pulled me through.”