Just Us Folk

Throughout her five-decade-long career in music, Connie Kaldor has always shone a light on everyday life in Western Canada, and specifically her home province of Saskatchewan. With songs like ‘Wood River’, ‘Bird On A Wing’, ‘Sky with Nothing to Get in the Way’ and many others, Connie has offered a glimpse into the beauty and grace that can be found on the prairies.

Her new album, Wide Open Spaces, is a tribute to the people and places she knows so well. What got the ball rolling to do a whole album of western-themed songs was the discovery of a song she had forgotten about, ‘Old Lady Whiskey’, which Connie had sung on Sylvia Tyson’s old TV show, Country in My Soul. “The song is really country. That’s why I didn’t record it before,” she said.

With encouragement from her husband and producer, Paul Campagne, Connie decided to focus the album on what she described as stylistically being Americana/Western/Country in sound. Co-producing the album with Paul was Zacharie Bachand who plays guitar with their son Aleksi. A McGill University grad majoring in jazz, Zacharie only needed a couple of tours with Connie before becoming an accomplished steel guitar player, she said.

As an example of Connie’s prairie sensibilities, she once posted a photo on Facebook of the Grassland National Park. It’s an area of landscape that holds a special place in her heart. When someone commented, “Kaldor, only you could find that beautiful,” she created the song, ‘To Those Who Say That There’s Nothing Here’. “I wanted to write about a place I find spectacular.”

She also wrote a song, ‘Cowboys Still Live in Saskatchewan’, which was based on a true story about a clash of western cultures. Since the video for the song was posted on YouTube in July, it’s had around 150,000 views. Connie even got a comment from someone who was at the incident in question. “I’d love it if I could brag that “The Saskatchewan Cattlemen’s Association approved of this video!” she said.

With the song, ‘Hitched Together’, Connie sees a parallel between the realities of farm life and being a singer-songwriter. She has a tendency to visit pawn shops and thrift stores while travelling. On one occasion, she saw a well-loved saddle for sale. She quickly thought about how small farms are disappearing, having been bought up by larger farms. Right away a lyric came to her:

“He kept the boots, but he had to sell the saddle.”

Once she had visualized the family behind the saddle, the song wrote itself.

“Drive past Calgary and there are these huge homes on what used to be someone’s little farm,” she said. “The song is about what people go through when they lose their livelihood through no fault of their own. It’s like being a musician. All of a sudden you can’t sell your albums. What do you do? Where do you go?” So, she felt a connection to those farmers, ranchers and everyday people of the prairies and wanted to write their stories.

As Connie sees it, there are benefits to being a folk singer. Mainly, no one is telling her what kind of songs to write. If she wants to write a song for a friend who couldn’t attend their mother’s funeral, such as, “If You Were There", she can. Plus, there’s an audience who will appreciate that song because it resonates with them in some way.

“It’s why we have so many great songwriters in this scene,” she said.

The strength of folk music is the power to connect you to your home or to a place that has meaning to you. It’s one of the reasons Connie admires people in Quebec and Atlantic Canada who have such an emotional hold on where they grew up.

“For me, being an English writer and speaker, there’s not as many songs that I would hear and say, ’That’s home for me.’ So that’s the challenge for me,” she said.

Although Connie has lived in Montreal for many years, raising her sons Gabriel and Aleksi and maintaining her career, she’s never far from the roots of her upbringing. Her husband Paul is also from Saskatchewan; they own and run a farm there, and of course still have family to visit there.

“Where you’re from shapes you in some way,” Connie said. “That always stays with you.”

Coming into the folk music scene in the early 1980s, there were very few women writing about a prairie woman’s perspective, so Connie almost had the market to herself. After living in Montreal for many years, writing about the west is a way to remind those who live there, what she calls “prairie dogs", how amazing a place it is.

“I don’t want to sing about fancy people,” she said. “I’ve always felt the need to write about things that are ignored or forgotten, and the absolute dignity of lives that are lived that seem ordinary.”

Given the number of songs about the west that she’s written over the years, Connie could have easily collected them from previous albums to make up this new release. But it was important to her to have a batch of new songs to share. Part of the reason is that she’s always writing, and in fact, there were a number of songs she didn’t use for Wide Open Spaces.

“I’d write every day if I could because it sure beats housework!” she said.

And nothing beats the feeling when a new song touches an audience. The process of writing a song is quite solitary. The issue or situation you write about is important to you, but you never know if it works until it’s presented in front of a crowd.

“My husband, Paul, played ‘Cowboys Still Live In Saskatchewan’ for a friend who’s a rancher out there, and he just loved it,” Connie said.

“To me that’s the proof in the pudding. That’s my job done.”

Another accomplishment for Connie was being able to use the word “casserole” in the title song.

“I’ve reached the peak of my songwriting career by getting that word in!” she said.

As far as her comment about there not being many songs that say “home” to her, the fact is, Connie has created her fair share of those kinds of songs.

For more on Connie Kaldor and Wide Open Spaces, go to https://www.conniekaldor.com/