Pandemic-era album finally gets chance to land After two postponed shows, the third time’s a charm for local chamber-folk artist Raine Hamilton By: Alan Small Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, May. 27, 2023

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Raine Hamilton can’t wait to stop riding the many cycles of COVID-19.

The chamber-folk musician, composer and avid cyclist — who teaches middle and high schoolers how to fix their rides — will finally hit the brakes Sunday night.

That’s when a twice-postponed concert to celebrate the release of her 2021 album, Brave Land, takes place at the West End Cultural Centre.

“Usually the hometown show is one of the first ones being played,” Hamilton says. “Instead, we get to have a hometown release show with the benefit of a couple of years of touring and performing experience, so we’re sharper than ever.”

The concert will be a fulfilment of several years of work, going back to when she began to write the album’s 11 songs, she says.

“I think it will be a great satisfaction for me. I feel like I’m the steward of these songs. They show up to me, they come up knocking on the ethereal door, saying, ‘Oh, hi,’ and I am responsible to them,” Hamilton says.

“It is just so important to me that this piece be done, that a specific concert honouring these specific songs happens.”

That’s not to say Hamilton, 38, has been lounging on the sofa the past couple of years, letting her guitar and fiddle collect dust.

Her trio, which includes bassist Quintin Bart and cellist Natanielle Felicitas, performed a livestream of Brave Land in January 2021 and has since appeared in festivals across Western Canada, including the Festival du Voyageur and Crankie Fest in Winnipeg in 2023.

Hamilton has also performed songs from Brave Land and her previous two albums with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Manitoba Chamber Orchestra in 2021 and 2022.

They are experiences she won’t soon forget.

”Man, playing with those ensembles is just like — what is the word for that? — it is sublime. It is such a beautiful teamwork,” she says. “I marvel at the teamwork of the ants, I wrote a song of the teamwork of the geese and right up there is the teamwork of the orchestra.

“It feels like riding a musical dragon, some benevolent dragon.”

The orchestra concerts haven’t spoiled Hamilton, though. When she takes the stage Sunday night with Felicitas and Bart, who have performed and rehearsed with Hamilton countless times, they’ll be in their comfort zone.

“With my string trio, it’s us and ourselves. We’re very attuned to each other and the way things shift. ‘Who’s going to lead this? Who’s going to cut this off?’ It’s us who decides. It’s all three of us at the helm,” Hamilton says.

Among the songs the trio will play is Over the Mountain, which Hamilton wrote while at an artist residency at the Banff Centre of Art and Creativity.

“If I am the ink that illustrates / spun from the stone / oh, what a mark I will make,” Hamilton sings joyfully in the song, adding she feels like there was a kind of “otherworldliness afoot” when she wrote it.

Hamilton has released two separate videos for Over the Mountain: one with the trio performing the song and another with American Sign Language artist Joanna Hawkins interpreting it — the song’s words and the emotions relating to them — with English subtitles.

Hawkins will be one of three ASL interpreters who will join Hamilton and company onstage Sunday.

It was always Hamilton’s intention to allow deaf fans to enjoy Brave Land as readily as those who can hear, and adding the ASL component to the concert is another reason she felt the need to make the Winnipeg show a reality.

“The main goal of it is to help increase access to the arts,” says Hamilton, who began incorporating ASL interpreters into concerts in 2016. “It’s an archetypal part of being human, to experience art and share that together. For people who are drawn to it, I want the doors wide open.”

Hamilton is working on another concept record, “a bicycle pop opera,” that will include another collaboration with city artist Sarah Thiessen, who worked with Hamilton on Brave Land.

“We understand each other on a deep and whimsical artistic level that is both profound and delightful,” Hamilton says.

“It’ll have songs and stories that explain the mechanics of the bicycle while using sound samplings from the bicycle and animation. It has a vague timeline, but I am in love with this project.”

alan.small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall