A Wanderer comes home

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This article was published 17/05/2024 (811 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ruth Moody didn’t expect to wait a decade to release a new album.

“Of course, motherhood was way more all-consuming than I realized,” she says with a laugh.

Wanderer, out today, has been waiting in the wings since the release of her last solo record, These Wilder Things, in 2013.

At first, the timing didn’t align with her backing band. Then, the co-founder of folk group the Wailin’ Jennys got pregnant with her son — who is now seven years old. And then the pandemic hit.

“It really has been a long time in the making,” Moody says over the phone from Nashville, where she was gearing down from a recent tour with the Jennys and preparing to hit the road solo.

“I’m just really excited to play these new songs.”

Wanderer is a chronicle of the last 10 years with songs about parenthood, relationships, melancholy and lessons learned. Yearning for a sense of home is a recurrent theme throughout the 10-track project.

Moody, 48, splits her time between Vancouver and Nashville and has lived much of her adult life as a musical nomad. She was raised on a goat farm in rural Manitoba and spent her formative years in Winnipeg before leaving home in her 20s to tour with local roots outfit Scrüj MacDuhk.

Her complicated feelings about Winnipeg are expressed in Seventeen, a song about tumultuous adolescent love and growing into resilience.

“I really associate it with my youth and a time of life where I was really trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do and it wasn’t the easiest time.

“I love it; I have really fond feelings about the city and about the people there that I stay in touch with, but I definitely feel like when I go back, I sort of have to face some of those old feelings,” Moody says.

However, she isn’t expecting any negative emotions while playing the Winnipeg Folk Festival this summer. Moody is set to open the festival on July 11 with a mainstage performance of her new material.

“It’s such a special festival. It’s the first place that I really discovered folk music — I was brought up largely on classical music — and it was really eye-opening for me,” she says.

“I have really, really wonderful memories of camping and volunteering and seeing music from all over the world.”

Moody played the first of many performances at Birds Hill Park in 1996 with Scrüj MacDuhk and, later, with the Wailin’ Jennys — a Juno Award-winning folk group that also features Nicky Mehta and Heather Masse — which continues to record and tour.

She was last on the folk fest bill as a solo artist in 2014. This time around, she’ll be joined on stage with her touring band, featuring her partner Sam Howard (bass, harmony) and friend Anthony da Costa (guitar).

Her son will be in the crowd for the first time.

There’s another local element to Wanderer, which Moody released on her own label, Blue Muse Records. Joey Landreth of Winnipeg roots band the Landreth Bros. joins Moody’s ethereal soprano on The Spell of the Lilac Bloom, a love song she wrote for Howard when they found out she was pregnant.

“I was really full of wonder and excitement, but also realizing that things were about to change forever. I’m really happy with how the duet turned out and having Joey be part of it was a real treat,” she says.

Wanderer is Moody’s third solo album. While it’s taken 10 years to arrive, the record’s creation and its content has followed all of the natural ebbs and flows of life.

“They’re songs about love and hope and heartbreak and grief and resilience — which I think are pretty universal themes,” she says. “At the same time, they’re quite personal and intimate.”

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @evawasney