Out of the woodwork Andrina Turenne emerges with bold solo album driven by French, Métis roots By: Alan Small Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Apr. 27, 2023

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This article was published 27/04/2023 (906 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you want to know what makes Andrina Turenne tick, what helps her music groove, a good place to start is Aikens Lake.

You’ll need to hop aboard a floatplane to get where the Métis and francophone singer-songwriter spent her summers growing up, though.

Her parents owned the Aikins Lake Wilderness Lodge, which is within the Atikaki Provincial Wilderness Park northeast of the city. It has no road access, and she grew to enjoy the wilderness.

“I didn’t grow up going to folk festivals and things like that because I grew up there, driving boats and being on lakes and rivers,” she says. “It’s always been a big part of me and I feel when I write music, I try to place myself where I feel the best, and that’s nature.”

So it’s no surprise that her debut solo album, Bold as Logs, has a boreal theme, even though boldness might not be the first thing on people’s minds when they encounter a stack of timber in a lumber yard or a sawmill.

“Isn’t it a wonderful thing to ponder?” she says of the meaning behind the album title. “What doesn’t make them bold? They’ve kept us alive for centuries.

“(The record) feels like a log floating down the stream: sometimes it’s rough, sometimes it’s calm but it’s on a trajectory and it’s a nice float.”

Turenne has found a gentle current to begin her solo career, after being a member of many groups, including Chic Gamine, the Juno Award-winning folk band that also included Alexa Dirks (Begonia), Ariane Jean (Sala), Annick Brémault and Sacha Daoud; they all went their separate ways in 2015.

Dirks has already gained critical success for her first two albums as Begonia, but Turenne says she needed more time to decide how she wanted to present herself and her songs.

“I wanted to be sure I was rooted and it would be something that was long-lasting, something I wouldn’t need to reinvent constantly,” says Turenne, who includes harmonies from Dirks on a couple of tracks on the album. “This experience, making this record by myself, has been, at times, scary because it feels very vulnerable. There’s nothing to hide behind, but that’s also empowering.”

The COVID-19 pandemic also got in the way, but her cross-cultural appeal made Turenne a go-to performer for safe-at-home streaming events that filled in for live shows.

Her francophone background was a perfect fit for the Festival du Voyageur, and she swung enough for a Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra streaming session.

She’s been part of Winnipeg’s folk-music scene for several years, but those who think Bold as Logs will remind them of Log Driver’s Waltz will need to find solid ground when they give the record a listen.

The opening track, Out of Luck, rocks out with power chords from producer Grant Siemens (Corb Lund) and guitarist Damon Mitchell (the New Meanies), who provide a fuzzy foundation for Turenne’s bright vocals. The sweet R&B rhythm of Same Thing shows Turenne has travelled beyond her same folky thing.

The trio are longtime friends and performed together in Rudimental, Turenne’s first group. They rekindled that youthful energy when recording Bold as Logs at Turenne’s house during the pandemic, when government restrictions allowed Turenne only two houseguests at a time.

“We used to hang out in basements when I was a teenager, listening to Aretha Franklin and J.J. Cale, a multitude of vinyl from that era,” Turenne says. “We were just so thirsty for music (during the pandemic). This once-a-week (meeting) was such an escape into a limitless world when we were creating for fun and for the joy of reconnecting.”

Even French-language tunes, such as Je suis un arbre — “I am a tree” in English — is a hard-paddler amid the rapids rather than an easy portage.

Turenne touches upon Métis traditions of honouring the spirit of her grandparents and the way the Canadian Shield meets the Prairies, but Siemens’ guitar solo and Mitchell’s rhythms have a southern-rock soul.

“We allowed ourselves to think outside the box and we wanted things to feel exciting, not phone in things that were already there,” she says. “We wanted to push ourselves to create stuff that is energizing for us.”

Turenne hasn’t turned her back on her folky side, though. Tourtes printanières, which has a Cajun fiddle accompaniment from Louis Michot of the Cajun group Lost Bayou Ramblers, who also tours with Arcade Fire, will stir the hearts of Métis and settler alike.

“My dad was the director of Festival (du Voyageur) in the ’70s and early ’80s and he was part of bringing Cajun music to the stages because he believed in building bridges with other minority francophone centres,” she says. “One of the things I love the most is the twin fiddles in Cajun music. It ties together the things I love.”

The album closer, See Me Through the Night, required little accompaniment at all.

The song had its inspiration in Morocco, when Turenne was part of a francophone theatre production with Cercle Molière that toured the north African country.

A friend in Winnipeg had died, and her grief led her to write a song while travelling between shows; she used her laptop to record her singing and plinking on a ukulele.

That moment of inspiration she captured remains the heart of the song after Siemens urged her not to re-record with a full band.

“To me it seemed crazy, because why would you do that?” she says. “I understood there’s a quality in the song you can’t replace.

“The result is this really tender moment. It’s a message of hope we need at one time or another.”

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @AlanDSmall