By Jim Barber
There’s always been many facets underlying the unmistakable, undeniable, unbridled talent of Canadian roots rocker Terra Lightfoot. Known primarily for the ferocity of her lead guitar playing, the incandescent intensity of her live shows, the exceptionally compelling and soul-stirring power of her songwriting, and a voice that sounds at times as if it was culled from the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta, many forget her earliest recordings were also filled with a deft sensitivity, a quietness that invoked feelings more wistful than wild.
At a point in her career where she feels comfortably exploratory and more significantly at a point in her life where she feels more grounded, more confident and just plain happy, Lightfoot has allowed, not necessarily her ‘softer’ side, but her more contemplative, her more instinctive, her more artful side out for a stroll.
The result may just be the most beautifully emotive album in her catalogue. An ode to hearth and home, to the simple things in life, to love, to the beauty of nature and to the blissfulness of a lifestyle that is unhurried yet still rich and full, she recently released her new album Home Front, through Midnight Choir/Sonic Unyon Records.
The way the album came together is actually not that much different from how most of Lightfoot’s music has been concocted over the years, with the early stages, including many demos, happening at home, often with the songcraft being accompanied by simple instrumentation. The big difference with Home Front, is that the process never went beyond the homespun nature of the early recordings. It was a deliberately truncated approach based as much on inspiration, instinct as it was on contemplation.
“This is usually how my songs come out. It’s almost always me on an acoustic guitar or an electric guitar in a hotel room somewhere. And it’s just me. Like the song, ‘The Only One of Your Kind’ [from her last studio album Healing Power] it ended up being this pop anthem. But in truth, I just wrote it in the living room on a Tuesday night. It’s was just the guitar and me and that’s it. What this new record is, sort of, is me feeling safe enough to just present it like that. And I think the key to it, if I’m quite honest, is making the record at home, because it’s an amazing spot that we have. And making a record with your husband [Jon Auer of The Posies] I’m sure it can be complicated as an idea, but for me it was just so safe and so fun. I felt free to be, you know, like a child, to be silly and do things I wouldn’t normally do,” she explained.
“And the album represents a new immediacy in my approach. I valued fast decisions. I valued first takes. I valued not editing things that I normally would edit. I wrote two songs on a Friday and we recorded them the following Monday. I didn’t leave myself a lot of time for reflection, deliberately. It was just, like, get it down, record it, and move on. And I don’t usually do that, and I loved it because I didn’t have time to think. I only had time to feel, which I haven’t actually conceptualized until saying that just now. I was acting instinctively. And people are so far saying that it is a departure. It is a fresh take on my work. It’s more intimate than ever before. I mean, I didn’t clock it as a departure. If I was thinking about it, I see this as just the logical direction we should go. Obviously, I’ll always be a rock and roll artist, and I will always have a rock and roll band, but, like, sometimes you just got to take a break.”
With any good story, and in this case it’s the remarkable story behind the creation of Home Front, there needs to be a setting. There needs to be a place where the drama or action takes place, where the characters play their parts, where the magic happens. For a musician, it is often the studio or stage where the alchemy comes together to make memorable, melodic art. In the case of Lightfoot’s latest musical outpouring, the role of her home by the water, in the middle of what is known as cottage country in central Ontario, is crucial.
For many years, when her home wasn’t a hotel room or touring vehicle, it was usually a domicile embedded within a large city such as Hamilton [her hometown] or Toronto, Ontario. Now it’s a devilishly unique cabin, with an abundance of land, nearby to a waterbody, with most of her neighbors of the animal, bird and marine variety. But there is a preamble to the main story, just as compelling, and one that led not only to the powerfully evocative songs on Home Front, but also the powerful life altering decision to move lock stock and rock and roll barrel to the idyllic rolling hills, dales, glens and forests of the Kawartha Lakes region.
“It’s kind of a wild story. A friend/fan of mine had given us use of a cottage on an island in this area. It’s called Peace Island. And I remember we drove around the area said, ‘oh, it’d be so cool to live up here,’ and we left it at that. Then when we were actually looking at houses, we realized we couldn’t buy one in Hamilton because they were so expensive. And then this one popped up, and it has a real artist vibe to it. We found later it’s because there was an artist who lived here and kind of transformed the house and antiqued it up in a way. There’s an old stone fireplace that looks like it’s from the 1800, and all kinds of other amazing artistic features. Like, this guy was very talented,” she explained.
“Nobody had sort of cared for it for a while, so it was obviously in our price range. It’s a fixer upper for sure. But we loved it as much as that guy did, the artist. There used to be murals on the walls in the house that have since been painted over. But we just feel very connected with the place, especially because of the view, sitting on the back porch where the first and last songs of the record were recorded [‘A Good Sign’ and ‘Hummingbirds Hum.’] It’s a big, beautiful pond back there, and we’ve seen moose and all kinds of animals. Often you can hear ducks fighting. It’s very fun. But the view … I mean, you just sit out there and everyone who comes over says, ‘oh I feel relaxed.’ So that’s sort of what I’m picking up and trying to share with people, right? It’s the power of nature, I guess. And I’ve always talked about this in my work. I’ve always talked about how getting out into nature on tour has gotten me through the grind. But truthfully, I think that all of us, I hope, can be affected by being outside and being in nature. I think it’s so important for us. I think for a lot of people, when we go outside, we actually remember things that have been sort of forgotten, like these big, deep ideas. If you’re stressed out and you go outside and you lay outside for an hour, you’re not going to feel that way when you go back in. And that’s sort of the piece that I think I was striving for when I started writing these songs, because that’s what I was doing. I was swimming, I was walking around in the garden. That’s how I was getting the songs. And they would come to me. I feel lucky about that, and to have that in my life. But I also think that it’s so important for me to share it because I want to help other people find that too. It’s there for everybody. It’s free. It’s the only thing that nobody’s charging us for.”
As well as the setting, the timing, or the times in the lives of the characters that a story takes place is also crucial to the weaving of a masterfully potent tale. Lightfoot is honest in stating that if she was not at the point in her life and career that she was, that if she was, say, still in her 20s, much of what she is talking about might be lost on her younger self. She would see the house in the meadow near a pond as a nice place to visit, but she wouldn’t necessarily want to live there.
“I think that’s the idea behind the name of the album – Home Front. In the past, if I went home to Hamilton from a tour, and I was home for a week, I’d go back out feeling still like I couldn’t keep going. I’d still feel burnt out. But when I come back here, this is the first place I’ve ever had in my life that I do not want to leave. You know, like I’m not saying forever, but when I come home, I’m like, ‘oh, it’d be nice to stay home for another couple of days.’ I’ve never had that. I think a lot of musicians probably have that same thing, because we live in spaces that are often not appropriate, or in different neighbourhoods or whatever you want to say about it. We’re living in spaces that aren’t our ideal. So finding that ideal for me at this stage has meant so much,” she said.
“I think that’s also why this record was the fastest one I’ve ever made, including deciding on the mixes, all of that. It happened in six months. To me, that’s absolutely wild. And the recordings themselves took just days. It was so fast, but I just didn’t even question it. In the past I had struggled for usually more than a year with each record. There’s just no struggle with this one. I think that maybe is helping me create deeper or better art. A few of these songs are basically demos. ‘A Good Sign’ and ‘Hummingbird’s Hum’ were part of a demo session and we recorded on the porch. I didn’t expect those songs because it was so fast. It’s just me and a microphone. There’s no editing, there’s no autotune. There’s nothing – it’s just a microphone in front of me and the guitar. We had to stop when cars went by, which was fun. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it was worth it.
“Another thing that kind of inspired it was this record [she holds up a vinyl copy of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album, Nebraska, which was a stripped down, one take, deeply heartfelt, low-tech masterpiece of songwriting]. It’s one of my favourite records. And I think the coolest thing for me was realizing that he wanted them to be demos. I just love Nebraska. And I love, too, that he’s an artist that always made these big anthemic rock records like Born to Run, and then he was like, ‘I’m going to go to a little cabin and record a few tunes on my own.’”
For many years, during her smokin’, incendiary live shows, there’s a moment or two that are quieter, more contemplative, more immediate and more connective. With an entire album of songs that are picture perfect for an acoustic set … or even an entire show … Lightfoot said she is open to incorporating more of those sorts of moments in her show.
“In our live shows that we do, even as the full rock band thing, the song that I know usually sticks with people is ‘Out of Time,’ [from Healing Power] for which there is a demo version on classical guitar on this record. I don’t know why we didn’t put the demo version on Healing Power originally. I kind of wanted to. But that’s the song that I think is the deepest, and people come away from our rock show saying, ‘that was a great rock show, and I really loved that acoustic song.’ I do think there’s more space for that, and I think people are also open to it. It doesn’t always have to be a hard-hitting rock thing. I played a special little solo show in Edmonton recently and I played a few songs from Home Front and the vibe was wild. It was so nice in that room. It was so … I don’t even know what the word would be. It was heavy, but in a beautiful way. I place ‘A Case of You’ as well, which I’ve never done live, and people loved it. So, yeah, I think there’s definitely space for that. I think a branch is sprouting. I think that’s the perfect way to describe it,” she said, before moving on to talk about another deep and deeply moving and affectionately lovely song on the album, ‘Sleepyhead,’ which is sung from the point of view of a doting parent, speaking lovingly to their youngster. What makes it all the more exceptional as an impactful piece of music, one that is absolutely infused with vivid sentimentality and memory, is that Lightfoot has no children.
“I think I come from a family of very strong women. I’m not talking about my grandmother and granddad who were the musicians in the family. I’m talking in general, like my mother and my aunt and her kids. We’re all sort of interesting characters in our own way. There’s so many kids in our family and I love them so much. I just have never had the opportunity, or the time or any of those things to have a kid,” she said.
“When it came time to write that tune, I was writing it from the perspective of any parent during the pandemic, obviously. But I also wrote, you know, the third verse about me when I was a kid, and remembering my mom driving me around. I think a lot of people identify with that because it was a soothing technique, perhaps, of the 1980s when I was born. I don’t know if people still drive their kids around to pt them to sleep or not. And those are also the most rewarding sorts of songs for me, my character songs; the ones that aren’t about me, because I’ve written so much about me. I love actually being a songwriter when I can take a story that isn’t necessarily about me or anyone and make it real. Those are my favourite sorts of songs that I’ve written.”
There is a sweetly sentimental tone also to what Lightfoot herself says is her personal favourite song from Home Front – the deeply romantic and atmospheric ‘Already There in My Mind.’
“That one was literally rolling around in my brain. This place is a real country home. We have a garden, and there’s all kinds of things needing to be done. We’re doing projects all the time, home improvements and all that stuff. That’s what I work on when I’m at home. I’m an unlicensed carpenter, if there’s such a thing. I’ve learned so much, but I also just love it. I love fixing stuff and improving things. So, I’m working on something that’s obviously more important to me than music at this time, my home, but this song won’t stop rolling around. So I just grabbed my phone, sat at the piano in the living room, and played the whole thing. It’s as fast as I wrote the song ‘Ruthless’ [from her 2017 album New Mistakes] I remember how fast that came out on the piano. It was just immediate, like six minutes or something, the words and everything, the melody, it was all there. And I think maybe at the end of the recording process, Jon was like, ‘hey, what about that song your wrote that day on the piano? That’s kind of a poppy one. Why don’t we try that out?’ And it seemed like it needed to be there, and I think you’ll agree that the album needed an ‘up’ moment,” she said.
“So we just banged that one out pretty quick before we left for a trip to Seattle. And I just love it, I love the vibe because it’s about surrender. I feel like so much of this past year or so has been so challenging. If you sit and you look at your phone, everyone’s going mental, whatever place they’re coming from. It’s always so stressful. So this song was about being, like, ‘whatever. There’s nothing I can do. I’m just going to move on, move forward, keep going. Go to that place where I feel good.’ And that’s why it’s so special because it just takes you out of that stress. It takes you from away from all the things going on and just puts you in a place of surrender.”
Like her home, her porch, her pond.
“Yes! Thank you,” she said.
More poignantly, the piano itself is not just any old piano, although it has an evocative pedigree. It’s her childhood piano – the family piano. The one that little Terra plinked and plunked away on with her parents listening to every note. It’s the piano that helped inspire her to strive to be the musician, performer, songwriter and important artist that she has become.
“My mom had me when she was 19, so that’s a tough time, a tough age to have any money. When I was, I think five or six, my mom and dad went on a payment plan to get that piano for me, so I could go into piano lessons. I don’t know how long it took them to pay it off, maybe 10 years. But that’s my actual childhood piano. And I guess maybe as a kid that grew up without a ton of stuff, that has a lot of value to me. It’s also the place that I learned to play, and that’s what I learned first. I learned piano from age five until age 10 when I picked up the guitar,” Lightfoot said, contrasting the enchanting nature of that song to the more serious subject matter infusing the song, ‘Yours Truly.’
“There’s inspiration for songs like that all the time. I think we all hear stories about domestic violence and we all know somebody that’s experienced it, whether we know they have or not. And so for me, the song was about capturing, or highlighting the innocence of these women. That it’s not their fault that they roll into these things, and the guy looks great on paper. It looks so wonderful, and then as they go deeper into it, things get worse and worse. And your friends start to say, ‘hey, are you okay?’ And you kind of go into these cycles where you just lose the person for a bit. But this song is about the woman getting her power back, and the woman saying, ‘I’m leaving.’ Stephen Fearing wrote a great song about this too [‘Stronger Than You Know’] which I think is great for him to be a supportive ally as a man.
“I think it’s a super important topic and one I’ve been very lucky not to experience. This is another one of those storyteller songs where maybe I tell a better story because it didn’t happen to me, you know. It’s definitely about strength, and I hope that it gives people hope. And I hope as much as it’s a quite detailed description of events, you can see it comes out on the other side as a positive thing. The woman is saying, ‘I’m not going to be yours forever.’ With songs and with subjects like domestic violence, I guess sometimes I feels like we’re singing in a bit of an echo chamber, you know what I mean. But the strongest men that I know are the ones that support women. That’s what I know because I’ve seen it. So I think this song is for them too. It is for everybody, and I think that’s what it needs to be like, because I think we need to spread the message, spread the awareness. There are so many different topics that we could be spreading awareness about, of course, but this is the one that I am choosing to represent on this record.”
Interestingly, the writer of this piece (me) was prompted by that story to posit the idea that for this song in particular, the album title Home Front has a special resonance. Domestic violence occurs in the home, which becomes a sort of battleground. Home front is the term used during wartime to describe the sort of last line of defence, those non-combatants who are back home, yet still at risk. Those people, the families, the invalided, the young and old, are always on high alert, having to be exceptionally careful, to walk sometimes through literal minefields. It is an unfortunately all-too-accurate description of the life someone living with domestic violence must lead.
“Oh man, I never thought about that. It just hit me now. It really just hit me now. And I do have these moments where I learn more about the album when I do interviews. I never really know what it’s about until I do five or six and then it hits me,” she said.
Lightfoot’s touring schedule, as always, is quite full, with trips across Canada and further afield. Right now, as you’re reading this, she is in the midst of another European sojourn alongside fellow Canadian Matt Anderson, with dates in Sweden and Finland before crossing the North Sea for a run through the U.K. before hoping over to mainland Europe for shows in Germany and The Netherlands. Back on the ‘home front’ (see what I did there!?!) Lightfoot will be opening for The Trews at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on Dec. ^, followed by a show at the Forest City Music Hall of Fame in London, Ontario, a week later. For more information, visit https://www.terralightfoot.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at bigjim1428@hotmail.com.
