Bright lights, smaller city

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This article was published 10/09/2024 (672 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a longstanding misconception that a fruitful music career can only come from moving to the big city.

Taylor Jackson’s creative trajectory has followed an opposite path.

The Toronto-born singer-songwriter moved to Winnipeg with her partner Dylan MacDonald (a.k.a. Field Guide) at the height of the pandemic and has since found a community of like-minded artists and industry promoters.

Jackson, 30, is set to release her debut EP, Boring, on Thursday.

“There is something special about Winnipeg that nowhere (else) really comes close to just in terms of community support and everybody lifting each other up in such an amazing way. Being welcomed into a community of so many amazing friends who are also creative people, musicians and writers — inspiration was coming at me from all angles,” she says.

Jackson and MacDonald met outside a bar on Dundas Street and lived together in Toronto until public health lockdowns saw them confined to their apartment. Winnipeg started to look like “the promised land” by comparison.

MacDonald is a Brandon-born musician and former member of the band Middle Coast, alongside Liam Duncan (Boy Golden) and Roman Clarke.

He’s part of a wide circle of young musical contemporaries — including Kris Ulrich, Cassidy Mann, Fontine and others — who regularly collaborate and tour together.

Becoming enmeshed in that world was a far cry from the competition Jackson felt among other artists in Toronto’s music scene.

“I think it’s largely because of the fact that it’s so expensive to live there … like, ‘I need this gig and if I don’t get it, I might not have money,’” she says of Toronto. “And I’m not competitive at all, I’m like, ‘You can take it, it’s OK.’

“That definitely caused me to avoid pursuing a career because I just didn’t want to feel that way.”

Moving to Winnipeg made music feel like a possibility again for the laid-back, sensitive artist.

Jackson comes from a musical family and studied acting in university. She started writing her own songs and playing music in 2019. The pandemic put a hold on performing, but inspired her to dive deeper into songwriting.

“I had nothing else to do, which was awesome. I would sit at our kitchen table, literally from the moment I woke up until around dinner time, just scribbling feverishly in journals,” she says.

Boring, a gauzy six-track indie-rock release, is a playful chronicle of Jackson’s personal growth in isolation when she was grappling with a new lifestyle and addressing previously untouched emotions in Zoom therapy sessions.

The second single and title track of the EP deals with looking for deeper meaning in life and the insecurities that arise from the ebbs and flows of a long-term relationship — pertinent topics for the former bartender whose social life previously revolved around late-night establishments.

Hoping For deals with yearning for community and togetherness, a recurring theme of the EP.

“I was thinking a lot about that when there was a lot of isolation going on for all of us. A through-line is craving closeness and self understanding,” Jackson says.

Other songs aren’t so heady. Solstice Song, for example, came out of a songwriting circle and was inspired by a “really sick” sunset.

While sharing her music publicly isn’t a natural inclination for Jackson, recording and promoting Boring has brought together the community she was manifesting in her journal all those years ago.

“It feels really special because of the group of collaborators that I get to do it with — I always dreamed of making music with friends and that’s what this totally was,” she says of the EP, which includes engineering by Ulrich, as well as musical support from MacDonald and Slow Spirit’s Natalie Bohrn and Eric Roberts.

Boring is available Thursday on most major streaming services. Jackson heads out on a western Canadian tour supporting Field Guide later this month.

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @evawasney