Mama’s Broke have spent the past eight years in a near-constant state of transience, pounding the transatlantic tour trail. They’ve brought their dark, fiery folk-without-borders sound to major festivals and DIY punk houses alike, absorbing traditions from their maritime home in Eastern Canada all the way to Ireland and Indonesia.
Nowhere is the duo’s art-in-motion approach more apparent than on their long-awaited sophomore record Narrow Line (May 13, 2022 on Free Dirt Records); it’s the sound of nowhere in particular, yet woven with a rich synthesis of influences that knows no borders. The eleven songs on Narrow Line burrow deeply, with close harmony duets, commanding vocals, and poignant contemplations on cycles of life, including birth and death. Tinges of Americana stand side-by-side with the ghosts of Eastern European fiddle tunes and ancient a cappella ballad singing, melding into an unusually accessible dark-folk sound. A careful listen of Narrow Line invokes an ephemeral sense of place—whether real or imagined—inviting us to take comfort in the infinite possibilities of life, whether or not we ever choose to settle down.
For a group defined by constant touring, it’s not surprising that the two artists that make up Mama’s Broke, Lisa Maria and Amy Lou Keeler, met on the road. As Lisa remembers it, “Amy was driving her old Mercedes from Montreal to Nova Scotia and I was looking for a ride. We spent the 17 hours in the car talking almost exclusively about music. By the time we reached Halifax we started playing together, and within a week or two became a band.” Both coming out of traveling communities that are focused on music and protest, the two owe the way in which they move through the world to the integrated and self-sustaining nature of DIY culture and activism. It was a busy life that took them on a roundabout annual touring schedule running between Canada, the United States, Ireland, the UK, and Europe. In each country, they built grassroots DIY communities to support their music or moved along the pathways of communal organizing that sustained other touring artists.
The driving force behind this band is – and has always been – the commitment to challenge borders between people, places, and traditions; while encouraging freedom of expression and community through music.
Sam Lee plays a unique role in the British music scene. A highly inventive and original singer, folk song interpreter, a passionate conservationist, committed song collector and a successful creator of live events.
Alongside his organization The Nest Collective and fellow collaborators Sam has shaken up the live music scene breaking the boundaries between folk and contemporary music and the assumed place and way folksong is heard. He’s injected a renewed passion into this old material, helping to develop its ecosystem by not only inviting in a new listenership but also interrogating what the messages in these old songs hold for us today. With his forthcoming album, Old Wow, he’s summonsed up a truly compelling and emotional album that takes his work to yet another level.
David Francey is a Scottish-born Canadian carpenter-turned-songwriter, who has become known as “one of Canada’s most revered folk poets and singers” (Toronto Star). Born in Ayrshire, Scotland to parents who were factory workers, he moved to Canada when he was twelve. For decades, he worked across Canada in rail yards, construction sites, and in the Yukon bush, all the while writing poetry, setting it to melodies in his head and singing it to himself as he worked.
A truly authentic folk singer, Francey is a documentarian of the working person who never imagined earning a living from his music. But when he was in his 40s, his wife, artist Beth Girdler, encouraged him to share his songs and sing in public. The reaction was instant. His first album Torn Screen Door came out in 1999 and was a hit in Canada. Since then, he has released eleven albums, won three Juno Awards and has had his songs covered by such artists as The Del McCoury Band, The Rankin Family, James Keelaghan and Tracy Grammer.
Louise is an artist and musician who grew up in Orkney, a group of islands in the north of Scotland. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2011 with an honours degree in Visual Communications, specialising in photography.
Growing up on a farm, she has always been inspired and influenced by the landscape and nature around her and feels privileged to be able to use her creativity and love for art and music to make her living. Louise shoots mainly on 35mm film using an Olympus OM2 once belonging to her father. She uses natural light to capture images which are honest and organic.
As a fiddle player, Louise enjoys a wide variety of music, but mostly plays and writes folk and traditional Scottish music. After being awarded a place and a scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music, Louise traveled to Boston in September 2015 to take some time to explore other genres of music.
Between her studies, Louise has been concentrating on her project ‘Out of My Own Light’ exploring her family ties to Canada and her own connection to her late Grandmother, Margaret Sarah Tait.
Roots powerhouse duo The Small Glories are Cara Luft & JD Edwards, a musical tour-de-force partnership planted on the Canadian Prairies. Thrown together purely by accident for an anniversary show at Winnipeg’s venerable West End Cultural Centre, The Small Glories could almost make you believe in fate.
With a stage banter striking a unique balance between slapstick and sermon, these veteran singer-songwriters have a way of making time disappear, rooms shrink, and audiences feel as they are right there on the stage with the band — writing the songs, living the songs, performing the songs. It’s not uncommon for listeners to find themselves laughing, dancing, crying, or caught up in a good ol’ fashioned sing-along. “We’re folk singers, we try to write stuff that people can relate to,” says Edwards, whose looming stage presence and penetrating eyes find him the yin to Luft’s petite, snort-laughing yang. The material of a Small Glories concert is welcoming in terms of subject, folk-pop melody and instrumentation — songs of love, loss, and environment, delivered with soaring, interwoven vocals on various combinations of stomping clawhammer banjo, guitar and harmonica. However, a Small Glories performance is really about what happens in-between the songs. “The feedback we get from a lot of audiences is that it’s not just about the music for them,” Luft says. “It’s the whole package.”
Thanks to a classical music background and a deep passion for Pop and Folk music, Aurora shapes her skills as a songwriter in her hometown (Palermo, IT). She studies Composition at the Music Conservatory and won a scholarship at the Berklee College Online.
After a life changing performance at the world-famous Bluebird Cafè in Nashville TN, Aurora finally decided to bring her songs to the audience. Quickly she became a notable artist in the local music scene, winning contests for Best Act and Best Original Song. In 2015 Aurora traveled to England to record her first EP & “Barefoot” in her friend’s home studio. The warm sounds and the pure voice soon captured the interest of Italian producer Fabio Rizzo, and the two worked together on her first LP “So Many Things”, published by 800A Records in February 2018.
The album received positive reviews from local newspapers and National press such as Italian marieclaire, and Aurora took part in many radio shows and TV shows, reaching a much wider audience. The power of Aurora’s music lies in the combination of sophisticated lyrics, memorable melodies and a unique and energetic voice. She has now become a Fender and G7th The Capo Company endorser, and has collaborated with the US Embassy House in Rome and Washington D.C.
What type of songwriter is Jay Psaros? That’s a question Psaros has been asking himself for years. Psaros, a long time resident of the Northeast was born into a family of the self employed. Like the self employed, his music has ebbed and flowed in and out of “where the work is,” so to speak.
Crossing genres as needed and blending styles as desired. At 34 years old, Psaros has worked in a most peculiar musical landscape. His gigs have ranged from bar rooms, to medieval themed dinner theaters, to small clubs, house concerts, weddings and everything in between. He’s hustled as a booking agent, produced for other artists, written music blogs and even taught the occasional lesson. Recently, a stroke of good fortune. On the cusp of a decade in the music industry, the sweaty bars and medieval costumes have given way to support slots for national acts and small headlining tours at regional clubs. Psaros has shared the stage with the likes of The Mavericks, Boz Scaggs, Daughtry, Third Eye Blind, Tower of Power, Ziggy Marley, Donovan Frankenreiter, Anders Osborne, Los Lonely Boys, Rick Springfield, Lisa Loeb, Three Dog Night, Rusted Root, Peter Cetera, Little River Band, The Original Wailers, Eddie Money, and Joe Nichols to name a few.
Kora Feder (Feder rhymes with cedar) is a rising voice in the new generation of songwriters up to the task of confronting the times we live in.
Spring of 2019 brought the release of her first full length album, In Sevens, produced by Rich Brotherton (of Robert Earl Keen, Mary Gauthier, Eliza Gilkyson, etc.) in Austin, TX. The record has already received critical acclaim, drawing comparisons to Pete Seeger’s writing (Roots Music Report) and Iris Dement’s voice (Americana Highways, Minor 7th). With features on numerous top picks and playlists, a highlight thus far has been the song ‘I’d Be a Maria’ making its way past 390,000 Spotify streams thanks to its placement on three Spotify editorial playlists in Europe.
A self proclaimed “songwriter and concerned citizen”, Feder has already gained international recognition for her craft: from winning second place in the International Songwriting Competition in 2019 (19,000 entries from 140 countries), to being featured for her writing at the Kerrville Folk Festival and Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 2018. In response to Feder’s Tiny Desk submission that received an All Songs Considered feature, NPR’s Pilar Fitzgerald described her song Automatic Times as carrying “an emotional weight that can stop you in your tracks, even long after the song has finished…a skillfully structured and impassioned plea for an end to gun violence.”
Although originally from Northern California, Feder spent that past three years living in New York City and recently moved to Philadelphia.
Lucy Wise is a Melbourne-based multi-instrumentalist and singer. Accompanying herself on guitar, ukulele and Appalachian dulcimer, she creates a contemporary sound that draws upon her roots in folk, Old Time American and Celtic music.
The evocative imagery and universal themes in Lucy’s songs have won the hearts of listeners from a diverse range of ages and backgrounds and have seen her tour three albums and two EP’s in Australia, NZ, the US and the UK since 2010. “Lucy is a natural storyteller, infusing songs with a sense of place so strong you can almost feel the dusty earth crunch beneath your feet as she sings,” says The Brag.
Lucy grew up in a musical household. Through childhood she toured as part of the Western Australia-based Wise Family Band playing an eclectic mix of folk, roots and blues, and at age 11, she started writing her own songs. Upon moving to Melbourne in 2009, Lucy dived into the local music community establishing herself as a beloved solo artist, celebrated for her insight poetic lyricism, and stunningly pure voice.
Lucy’s latest album, “Winter Sun” was received with critical acclaim: a 4.5 star review in the Weekend Australian and a nomination for The Age Music Victoria Awards’ Best Folk or Roots Album. Comprising songs about love, friendship and the relationships people form with their environment, the album draws on Lucy’s experiences over the last few years of touring as well as times spent closer to home, walking the streets and creek paths of Melbourne’s inner north. “A wonderful representation of healing, self discovery and the processes of becoming grounded and learning self worth…It is no secret that Lucy is a gifted writer, but “Winter Sun” will have you experiencing a new sense of empathy and have you walking in her shoes from track one,” says 27 Magazine.
