Press

5 star review from Roots Music Report Radio Charts
Reviewed By: Duane Verh
With a voice equally warm and world-weary, singer/guitarist/banjoist McRae tells tales of the lost, the lovesick and the loner. Track after track, her stories are stand-alone gems, elegant in their minimal orchestration and united by their modest charm. At seeming ease with protagonists of either gender, McRae’s sketches out restless, solitary men (“Deck Of ‘52”, “Higher Ground”) as convincingly as she does forthright female romantics (“Gepetto’s Boy”, “Hope It Lasts Through Supper”). A quietly masterful effort.






Penguin Eggs Review - Rough Edges & Ragged Hearts
Penguin Eggs – Mike Sadava
I predict that 25 years from now the folksingers of the day will still be borrowing songs from this disc.

McRae, who cut her teeth with Spirit of the West, has been living in Nashville, studying clawhammer banjo and Appalachian music but this fourth solo album is no old-time pastiche. It’s pure McRae - no fake hillbilly accent but true, heartfelt lyrics sung with McRae’s pure, husky, mature voice.

She gets help on a few tracks from Gurf Morlix, Doug Cox, The Sojourners and Ray Bonneville, but it’s all about the songs. Most of the tracks are co-written with her husband, James Whitmire. There’s plenty of pain, but light at the end of the tunnel. “I bought a house with no windows and it’s darker than three midnights in a jar,” she sings in Three Midnights, a song about addiction. The title song begs for affection despite scars and other imperfections.

My favourite line on the disc speaks to McRae’s link between truth and love: “My love’s made of truth and all things good, I won’t end up like Geppetto’s boy.” While she does a great cover of Hank Williams’s Ramblin’ Man, McRae’s own songs are up there with the great master.


CFMA's Nominate Rough Edges & Ragged Hearts "Contemporary Album of the Year"!
Canadian Folk Music Awards has nominated Linda's new recording Rough Edges and Ragged Hearts for Contemporary Album of the year. Linda's and her team are very pleased and excited to have been given this honour.

http://folkawards.ca/awards-night/nominees/

Pick of the Week - CKUA & Alison Brock Interview
Live interview here: http://www.ckua.org/06/04/12/McRae-Linda/landing.html?blockID=611818&feedID=7578

Alison's review here:
Linda McRae has never been a slave to fads or trends. Celebrating 25 years in music this year, she is blessed with one of the most pure, soulful, honest and distinctive voices in Roots music, period! After an almost decade-long career playing and singing with Spirit Of The West, in 1996 she decided to pursue a solo career and to-date has released four independent discs which have all received rave reviews.

Now living in Nashville with husband and songwriting partner James Whitmire, this album is the debut of their collaboration and WOW does it work! The songs go straight to your heart. This, coupled with Linda’s talents as a multi-instrumentalist, raises the recording to a whole new level. They also include a couple of covers including an amazing version of Hank Williams' "Ramblin' Man."

Linda co-produced the album along with Mark L'Esperance, with whom she has worked with before. Guest appearances include some amazing musicians - Gurf Morlix, Doug Cox, Ray Bonneville and Po'Girl's Samantha Parton.

The album's sound is born out of Appalachian traditions (which Linda has been studying) yet at the same time completely vibrant today.

Linda McRae will touch your heart with this record, 'cause whether we like to face up to it or not, we all have our Rough Edges and Ragged Hearts.

Penguin Eggs Feature Article
On the last song of her new disc, Linda McRae clearly expresses her
philosophy of life: “You won’t be thrown in the baker when you
meet your maker if you be your own light.”
After 25 years in the music business Linda McRae has found her
own light, and more specifically her own voice.
McRae has come up with a gem of an album, Rough Edges and
Ragged Hearts, that is as close as you get these days to pure and
genuine folk. Many consider this her best work, which considering
the length and breadth of her career, is saying a lot.
She was best known as the bass player with the ridiculously
successful Celtic rockers, Spirit of the West, and followed that as a
fixture in Vancouver’s alt-country scene, touring with Rodney
DeCroo and the Killers and recording with the likes of Neko Case.
What a long strange trip it’s been, but McRae, a grandmother of
two, has never felt better about herself or her music.
“I think I’m finally bringing that (her own voice) out,” she says
following a late night at Vancouver’s Rogue Folk Club where she
released her new disc. “I feel like I’m comfortable in what I’m
doing.”
Comfortable does not mean complacent. In fact McRae could be the
role model for life-long learning. While she gets instrumental and
vocal backing from the likes of Gurf Morlix, Ray Bonneville and
the Sojourners, this disc is largely centered around her clawhammer
banjo, an instrument she only started playing in the past few years.
Strange as it may seem, she had never listened to old-time or
bluegrass music until she saw O Brother Where Art Thou, which
opened her ears to the Stanley Brothers and then Hazel Dickens,
Alice Gerard, Charlie Poole and the list goes on.
She has attacked the banjo full-tilt, attending camps and taking
classes from the likes of clawhammer ace Brad Leftwich. “I’m so
glad I discovered the banjo, especially for a solo singer-songwriter.
My music has been redefined because of that instrument — it’s
what has taken me out of alt-country to folk and into old-time. …
It’s fun just to learn new stuff. When I’m coming up with a new
exercise on guitar or banjo, that’s when I find the songs coming
out.”
For many years McRae was more of a multi-instrumentalist,
especially on accordion and bass, rather than a songwriter.
“I tried to write with Spirit of the West, but it never worked. It
wasn’t me. It was like being a Nashville writer writing for someone
else.”
Rough Edges is McRae’s fourth solo album, and she credits her
American husband, co-writer and manager, James Whitmire for
much of the leap in the quality of songwriting.
The couple met on line, she says with a bit of a laugh, noting that
she met a lot of people though the music business, but none who
sparked any romantic interest. They hit it off immediately after
meeting, married in 2007 and settled in Nashville, in part to put her
near the source of the Appalachian music she was studying.
Whitmire as not a musician, but made his living raising large
donkeys (16 hands high) called American mammoth jackstock.
While he’s new to songwriting, Whitmire took to it right away.
“Some of the stuff we’ve written together is the best I’ve ever
written.”
Although she’s on the road more than she is at home, McRae has
thoroughly enjoyed living in Nashville. There’s far more to the city
than the commercial country hit factory, she says. As the Lovin’
Spoonful sang nearly 50 years ago, there’s 1,352 guitar pickers in
Nashville, and her new home has put her in touch with some great
songwriters, including David Olney and Mike Farris.
Being in Nashville has also encouraged her to get out more and
perform, and for the first time in her long career she is doing it
mainly as a solo act. She downsized originally for financial reasons:
after all, it’s hard to make money touring with a band these days.
But she has started and thoroughly enjoying life as a solo act. Being
part of Spirit of the West or an alt-country band, she never had to
talk much on stage. But a Home Routes tour, which brought her
into intimate contact with audiences in people’s homes, made her
realize that telling stories is part of the job of a folksinger, and she
has surprised herself by becoming quite the storyteller.
But with that unmistakable husky, mature voice, as well as her
instrumental versatility, others want her to sing with them
A cobbled-together, old-time trio called Daughters of Blood and
Bone, with McRae, Melissa Devost and metropolitan Horsefly’s
own Pharis Romero, was a huge hit at ArtsWells this summer.
“I never before sang three-part harmony with women and the blend
we had was pretty amazing. … We’re going to have a little
powwow to see where we can take it. We were pretty shocked.”
McRae also hopes to be back in prison — not as an inmate but as a
performer and teaching songwriting workshops. McRae and
Whitmire were recently doing just that at New Folsom Prison in
California through the Arts in Corrections program, and the inmates
could really connect with Whitmire, who had been an addict 25
years ago. While a lot of these people deserve to be locked up,
many are there because of wrong turns and mistakes, she says. They
hope to go back to New Folsom, and have arranged a couple of
prison workshops in Canada, as well as some work with at-risk
youth.
It’s part of their desire to give back. A dollar from each disc sold is
going to the Canadian Shriners Children’s Hospital, in part because
Whitmire was an outpatient at a children’s orthopedic hospital
when he was a youngster.
Grateful for being able to earn her living through music, she also
has a desire to help younger people seeking to travel the musical
road. A lot of young musicians give her discs, and often it’s
apparent they’re trying to sound like Ani DiFranco or some other
popular artist.
“Everybody is unique and when people try to sound like somebody
else they’re doing themselves a disservice. They should find their
own voice.”


Performance Review - Peter North, CKUA, Alberta
I have said it before and I’ll say it again. There’s something about sitting with a performance for a few weeks and allowing oneself to absorb and completely appreciate what has been witnessed, rather than having to respond to artistic expression in the blink of an eye.

For a couple of decades I found myself racing back to either the Edmonton Journal or Edmonton Sun and having to file concert reviews that would have a very short turnaround. This isn’t a complaint, it is part of the given job description but even the timelines as a reviewer changed drastically between my first taste of reviewing shows for the Sun, when I first landed in that newspaper’s newsroom toward the end of 1985, and 2004, when I decided I had filed my last concert review for the Journal. I clearly recall being able to sit through a complete 90-minute concert at The Jubilee Auditorium or two mid-week sets of an act performing at the Sidetrack Café and making my way back to The Sun around 10:30 pm.

Editors were never stressed or demanding that copy be filed inside of thirty minutes, which is what the drill had become by the time we entered the new millennium. In the days of of three-set shows at the Sidetrack Café or a blues joint like Jasper’s, which was located in the Convention Centre, your local columnists were given a good two hours to construct a review and reasonably reflect on the show and audience’s response. By 1999, a reviewer’s time spent listening to an artist had been trimmed to, in some instances, thirty minutes before it was time to bolt back to the newsroom. Your trusty scribe was supposed to accurately inform an audience as to how a show had taken shape and unfolded with the hope that one or two of the highlights in a full-length concert had been dished out in the five or six tunes he or she heard. Good luck!

The process had become increasingly unfair to the artists on stage, as well as the audience which was expecting a detailed and accurate account of the show the following day, and to the reviewer assigned to the task. Could you imagine a newspaper insisting on a deadline for covering a Calgary Flames or Edmonton Oilers hockey game fall at 9:20 p.m. when there’s still 17 or 18 minutes left in the third period of a tilt? Come to think of it, the way newspapers are operating these days, we just might see that scenario come to pass some time, but it hasn’t happened yet.

So why am I spending so much time and space musing on this point? We’ll I’ve been able to sit with a number of fine performances since the summer concert season rolled in as of mid-June and one artist whose talents I have spent a great deal of time reflecting on, and assessing, are those of Linda McRae.

Linda’s latest recording Rough Edges & Ragged Hearts received a wonderfully warm reception at CKUA when it was released at the top of the summer and shortly after the disc landed in the CKUA library it found its way to the pole position in the network’s top 30.

Like so many of us, I was first introduced to Linda when she was invited in to an expanded line-up of Spirit of the West where she added her voice, bass playing and squeezebox talents to the Spirit sound. Not long after Spirit of the West members decided to take an indefinite hiatus, Stony Plain Records put Linda in the studio with established musician, but fledgling producer, Colin Linden and her solo career was officially in flight.

In the ensuing 15 years, much has happened in Linda’s life. More solo albums, a short but very memorable stint with a fabulous group of west-coast roots, rockabilly and western swing warriors known as the Knotty Pines, periods of relentless touring, and hosting songwriting circles and workshops in Vancouver account for a great deal of the first ten years of that time frame.

A few years ago Linda put down roots in Nashville and the move enabled the singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist to spread her wings and soar as an artist. Part of the move was inspired by a blossoming personal relationship with James Whitmire, who is American, and one has to believe “the call from the heartland of Americana music” was also inspiration for Linda to build a new home in Tennessee. Immediate access to the sounds of a vibrant and generations-old culture have allowed McRae to hone her musical vision with the tutelage from some amazing mentors and just good old osmosis. It was apparent a couple of years ago, while witnessing this veteran musician in concert at the Blue Chair Café in Edmonton, that a more clearly defined focus was at the core of McRae’s body of work and presentation.

After taking in a handful of McRae’s shows and workshop appearances at the Arts Wells Festival a few weeks ago, I can say that this is an artist who has taken strides that are remarkable for any number of reasons and inspiring on so many levels. The night before the Arts Wells Fest officially kicked off, McRae performed on the inviting outdoor stage at the Bear’s Paw Café. While drawing on much of the material found on Rough Edges & Ragged Hearts, she also salted in pieces from her previous solo releases that were dispensed with the appropriate instrumental framing that included both electric and acoustic guitars, accordion and banjo.

Without disrupting the evening or acting in any manner like a diva, McRae politely put the pause button on the proceedings to iron out problems with the soundman’s mix before returning to the stage to cradle originals like "Deck of ’52" which is her touching tribute to Townes Van Zandt, and "Three Midnights" before putting a testifying spin on the Hank Williams gem "Ramblin’ Man".

Her voice, one that has always been pleasant and pliable, has become an instrument of remarkable emotional depth. Songs of tragedy and tears seamlessly traverse to those of triumph or humor with an ease of understanding exactly what requires bridled intensity and what invites a focused, yet slightly loose fitting arrangement. As McRae’s show progressed, conversations at the Bear’s Paw tables turned to hushed whispers of approval, then gave way to complete silence until the last notes of songs echoed up the road to Barkerville, before applause took over the night for a few seconds.

Little did I know that two days later I’d be gobsmacked by a debut performance from McRae and the Daughters of Blood and Bone who would be holding court in a church in historic Barkerville. With temperatures hovering around 30, a crowd of 75 jammed every nook, pew, and aisle of the church just inside the gates of the gold mining town that was thriving back in 1865.

Linda McRae, Pharis Romero and Melisa Devost were introduced to the crowd and within the space of a verse and chorus had the goods to deliver a stunning set, one built on or dipped in tradition, all beautifully blurring the lines between hardcore country, bluegrass, blues and gospel music. McRae and Romero both took opportunities to reflect on the days this trio spent rehearsing in nearby Horsefly B.C., and there’s no question that rehearsal went a long way to making this performance such a memorable debut. “We had a wonderful time working on the arrangements for these songs. Drinking wine, sitting in the sunshine and finding our places in these songs,” said McRae at one point in the concert.

But rehearsals are only part of the equation with Daughters of Blood and Bone; this trio has something that can’t be captured by or developed by rehearsals alone. That magical component known as chemistry is the Daughters' ace and it showed itself time and time again via exquisite harmonies and deadly dynamics. The trio sailed through a 50-minute set that spun riveting renditions of material from the books of Bill Monroe via Hazel Dickens, Tom Waits from Mulebone Variations, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Radiohead and Hank Williams Sr. deep into the w- eathered wood of the tiny rustic venue.

There were two additional highlights of the set that left time momentarily standing still. One was a piece borrowed from the Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris Trio project. The other was McRae’s "Be Your Own Light". The latter closes McRae’s Rough Edges and Ragged Hearts recording and it’s a swirling yet pointed, gospel infused number that has the potential to be an anthem in folk music circles.

With color and depth coming from the dobro of Doug Cox and the vocals of The Sojourners on the album track, at this concert, McRae, Pharis and Devost found a perfect balance between the power and universal nature of the lyrics and a place where barely harnessed vocals shook the beams of St. George’s church. My immediate thoughts after witnessing Daughters of Blood and Bone were the same as having heard Dry Bones at the Vancouver Island Music Festival in the summer of 2011, those thoughts being that “this group deserves to be playing major festivals throughout the country…..immediately.”

But back to McRae’s growth as an artist at this particular juncture of her career. I’d be hard pressed to name an artist who has upped the ante to such a degree at this stage of an artistic journey. Her command of all the instruments she plays is impressive, and as I mentioned her assured confidence as a singer infuses that much more range and emotion to a lyric. Moving stateside has obviously had a huge impact on McRae and working in circles of musicians who insist on setting the bar higher with each passing gig and recording has made a profound impression on this dedicated musician. Listen to her talk about her experiences directing music and writing workshops at Folsom Prison, playing at the Hank Williams Museum, interacting with new peers like Caroline Herring, and collaborating with her poet husband James Whitmore and the result is inspiring on so many levels.

Pick up Linda McRae’s Rough Edges & Ragged Hearts disc - it’s a work that should be nominated for Juno later this year and one that deserves all the accolades and raves it has received.

And when Linda McRae next rolls into your town, make sure you have a front row seat.

http://www.ckua.com/08/27/12/Rough-Edges-and-Ragged-Hearts/landing.html?blockID=629579&feedID=7590


Canadian Folk Music Awards, Paul Mills Interviews Linda McRae
Live performance footage and Paul Mills' interview with Linda



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