A tour through Alberta and B.C. to celebrate her latest album and “all the little things that we do” will bring the humorous and poignant musical observations of prairie girl Connie Kaldor to Nanaimo.
The multi-Juno award winning singer and songwriter will play the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 256 on East Wellington Road on Wednesday, Oct. 19, at 7:30 p.m.
Hailing from Saskatchewan, Kaldor has toured the world, and was named a member of the Order of Canada in 2006 for her achievements in folk singing and writing.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time and I have a huge number of songs that I can pull out of my bag,” she said. “But you always kind of choose songs that, often times, have something to do with where you’re playing. But I always have fans [in Nanaimo] that wants songs that I’ve written.”
She said that coming back to the West Coast is like coming home, in the sense that she credits her time spent in Vancouver as where her career really started.
“I do have a prairie thing, though, since I’m from the prairies and I kind of took it upon myself to explain prairie culture to everyone. And there’s a lot of prairie refugees out on the West Coast,” she said, adding that they likely came out west in their curling sweaters and Roughrider hats.
Kaldor also noted that an exciting part of playing on the Island again is that she gets to ride the B.C. Ferries.
“Any time I get to go on a boat, it’s a big thrill … I just love water and the ocean,” she said.
Although her 16th album, Everyday Moments, was originally released March 2020, Kaldor said the are only able to dore hasn’t been a release tour until this year, and that like most of her albums, it doesn’t stick to one style but skirts several of them.
She said a song of the same name on the album was originally inspired by a friend who requested she write about all the jobs that women do, such as housework, that nobody ever writes about.
“I was sitting around and I saw this ad that said ‘what does your life add up to?’ And I was sitting there with her thought it my mind, and I thought ‘a thousand meals, a thousand dishes’,” she joked. “I’ve been lucky in that a lot of the songs from the prairies were never written, nobody thought it was worth writing about. A lot of songs from a woman’s perspective weren’t written. So that just allowed me to write anything – it’s all new and fresh.”
Everyday Moments, the song, focuses on “all the things that we do” that seem to slip away and disappear over time as you do them every day, she said.
“Those are the things that matter, the human things that so rarely get celebrated.”
On her tour, Kaldor will be performing alongside her husband, Paul Campagne, and two sons Gabriel and Aleksi Campagne.
“We make jokes that I’ve done the long haul thing and I wanted to get family harmony, so I just gave birth to part of my back-up band,” she said.
Tickets for Wednesday’s show can be purchased online at www.eventbrite.ca.
READ MORE: Canadian Folk Music Award-winning duo stops in Nanaimo during international tour
mandy.moraes@nanaimobulletin.com
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