Birth of a producer

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This article was published 29/03/2024 (569 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The text from Lana Winterhalt came about nine minutes before a scheduled interview and a few weeks before she was due to give birth to her first child.

“OK, interesting update from me,” it began.

There were contractions and it might be nothing significant, she wrote.

“But I may also be going into early labour (laugh-cry emoji x3) I will have to be in touch when I can … very strange update, I know LOL.”

The next morning, a text arrived with a lead sentence just as dramatic: “Ben! Did not have a baby!”

It was a standard stretch for one of the city’s most productive musicians, who in the last six years has created 10 self-made, self-engineered collections. That’s just a snippet of Winterhalt’s exhaustive output.

Inspired by a pair of national music training initiatives, two years ago, she co-founded Good + Plenty, a mentorship and skill-sharing collective for women, non-binary, gender diverse and two-spirit folks interested in music production and engineering.

She also moved from Winnipeg to Lorette, where shortly after welcoming her latest album, Recovering Theatre Kid, into the world, she and her husband will welcome their first child.

It’s been busy, but that’s the only way Winterhalt knows how to be.

After performing in community theatre and choir as a child, Winterhalt’s career in music began at open mics with sets consisting entirely of original tunes.

“I didn’t know I could or should be playing covers,” she says, laughing. “When I was 18, someone asked if I knew any and I was like, ‘Should … should I be doing that?”

Soon, the graduate of Linden Christian Collegiate was incorporating Death Cab for Cutie and Sufjan Stevens into her repertoire. She carried those covers and originals one province westward when she studied adolescent psychology and music at a college in rural Saskatchewan.

In Moose Jaw, Winterhalt would play every gig she could get her hands on.

“At the time, I identified as a folk artist simply because I didn’t know what else I was or what else a woman holding a guitar could be,” she recalls. “It’s pretty easy to put a woman playing guitar into a box — ‘Oh, she must be trying to be Joni Mitchell’ — but a big shift happened when I started to produce my own music, realizing that what I was envisioning was completely different than what I could do onstage with only me and my guitar.”

After returning to Winnipeg in 2016, Winterhalt started working on her first full-length album, If & When, which involved much more electric production and an exploration of looping.

When the pandemic struck, Winterhalt’s employment as a dorm advisor for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet dried up.

“I went into total music mode and realized, this is what I need to do in my life,” she says.

Winterhalt applied and was accepted to Music Publishers Canada’s Women in the Studio national accelerator program, an eight-month intensive course, in 2021.

She also participated in Manitoba Music’s Canadian Songwriter Challenge, which paired participants with mentors from across the country.

One mentor, Kim Temple, recalls being floored by Winterhalt’s voice and impressed by her drive to learn, obvious even through the interface of Zoom.

Temple, the president of High Priestess Publishing, an arm’s-length firm associated with Toronto’s Six Shooter Records (July Talk, Boy Golden, William Prince, Tanya Tagaq) signed Winterhalt almost immediately.

Other mentors, including hip-hop artist Shad and folk-country singer-songwriter Donovan Woods, took note.

“Here’s me really bragging. Both of them told me my song Static was perfect and had zero notes. So thank you, Manitoba Music,” says Winterhalt.

What impresses Temple most about Winterhalt is that she didn’t keep her newly acquired knowledge to herself.

“I love that Lana has started teaching other people that (production) is not impossible, but completely doable. It’s very Lana to share instead of hoarding information,” she says.

Two years ago, Winterhalt was looking for a Manitoba woman, non-binary or two-spirit person to mentor her in music production.

“Many people I asked said, ‘You’re probably the most qualified of any person we can recommend. I was flabbergasted. I’ve been doing this for two years and you’re telling me I’m the most qualified?”

So Winterhalt, Ila Barker and Veronica Blackhawk (of Tinge) started a Facebook group for members of those communities interested in music production.

“On Friday, there were nine people. By Sunday, there were 99, so I was like, ‘OK, we’re here, we just don’t know about each other yet,” she says.

Though she spends a great deal of time focused on the work of others, Winterhalt’s new indie-pop album, released this month independently and being launched with a variety show at the Handsome Daughter on April 6, should solidify her reputation as a producer, songwriter and performer in her own right.

Split into three acts, complete with an introduction and an intermission, Recovering Theatre Kid puts Winterhalt at centre stage, sharing her thoughts — about parenthood, about performance and about getting enough sleep at night — openly with her listeners.

“This album is everything I wanted it to be,” says Winterhalt, who worked with Jon Paul Peters at Private Ear Recording on the record.

“And I can’t make excuses. I curated every sound. If people don’t like it, that’s fine. It’s what I like and it’s not filtered through another engineer or producer. This was what was in my brain.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com