If you were lucky enough to catch one of Rose Cousins’ solo performances during HUFF last fall, you will remember her riveting guest, Minnesotan Rachel Kilgour, So we are thrilled that she is returning to Halifax to do a co-headlining show with our own Terra Spencer at The Carleton on Thursday, May 8th. Show time for this perfect pairing is 7:30 PM and tickets are $30 + HST.
Like her father, Rachael Kilgour is a hard worker. She comes by her considerable skills honestly, honing her craft over the past decade in listening rooms, festivals, concert halls, and recording studios, and picking up accolades along the way. Kilgour first attained notoriety outside her native Duluth, MN as the grand prize winner of the 2015 international NewSong Music Performance & Songwriting Competition and winner of the 2017 Kerrville New Folk Contest. She has been featured at NYC’s Lincoln Center, at The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and at the Sundance Film Festival. Her oft-noted “unapologetic lyrics” (Rolling Stone) and “master crafted indie folk” sensibilities (Billboard) are on full display in her latest collection of songs, My Father Loved Me.
Created during the period of time spanning her father’s dementia diagnosis, his death, and its immediate aftermath, the songs that would become My Father Loved Me were a way for Kilgour to keep pace with her shapeshifting grief. Dad Worked Hard speaks about the sorrow of watching her once steady father deteriorate in body and mind, and the injustice of not being able to afford appropriate care for a man who worked long days as a building contractor all his life. In the song Heart on Fire, Kilgour transforms one of her recurring intrusive thoughts—the image of her father’s familiar form entering the crematorium—into a profound testimony to the persistence of infinite love beyond the finite body.
Bad ideas, VCRs, crumbling factories, hairy dogs, questionable tattoos…all are fair game for Nova Scotian funeral director-turned-songwriter Terra Spencer. And the songs are good ones, judging from the stack of awards her three albums have received, and from the caliber of collaborators like Ben Caplan, Dave Gunning, and David Francey, who welcomed Terra as a co-writer and performer on his JUNO-winning album The Breath Between.
Terra has just released her fourth solo album, Sunset, named the Penguin Eggs Album of the Year alongside Julian Taylor’s Pathways. Its dozen songs feature guests from East to West – Matt Andersen, The Bombadils, Ryan Cook, Ian Sherwood, Pillow Fite, and Stephen Fearing. Although her butterscotch voice, deft fingerstyle guitar, and gospel-charged piano make her a formidable musician, it’s her onstage ease and crackling homespun wit that make each show feel like a knee-to-knee conversation in a room of 5 or 500.
“The real deal.” – Ron Sexsmith