Bri-anne Swan takes any chance she can get to play in Canmore.
“I like the community, there’s a really vibrant arts community in Canmore,” she said in an interview last week. “I know a few people in Canmore, so it’s nice to see them, but Canmore has a very good reputation across Canada for being friendly to musicians and artists.
“And it’s beautiful, how could you beat Canmore in terms of a beautiful town to visit?”
The Toronto-based musician is playing at Ralph Connor United Church on Aug, 13. The show starts at 7:30 and admission is $10. Children 12 and under are free.
“Basically, I just play concerts in little towns I like to visit, so I have an excuse,” she confessed.
“The venues are really good, and they’re good for the community and the acoustics are great,” she added, noting many of the shows of the tour are in churches. “I like working with community groups, it makes the concerts kid-friendly.”
Swan self-describes her music as being mix of ‘60s folk and the U.S. anti-folk movement.
“The best way to describe it is Regina Spektor and Joan Beaz meet up in the woods with Gordon Lightfoot for a cup of hot chocolate,” she said. “It takes the elements of what people identify as folk in terms of lyrics and stories and presents it in a little more upbeat sort of way.”
Her songs stay away from the more traditional love song themes and focus more on character analysis.
“It’s a lot of themes that are found in Western monotheistic faiths, but presents it in a more modern context,” she explained. “Like what would happen if the story was told from Bathsheba’s perspective, in terms of the story of David and Bathsheba?
“And there is also some political commentary. I have a new EP called Ballad of a Canadian Superhero, about what life used to be like for a superhero and how they can’t get any work now.”
Swan has been making music professionally for about three years, though her love affair with the art form began much earlier.
“I’ve been singing since pretty much before I could talk and have been an avid music lover since the womb,” she said. “I started writing when I was in high school.”
Disenchantment with university drove Swan to take her music to a higher level.
“It just happened organically, I had absolutely no aspirations of being a singer-songwriter, I was just doing it for fun,” she said. “I would go to open stages and then people started inviting me to open for them, and then venue owners started inviting me to do shows, and it just took up more and more of my time and I was making money at it and loving it a lot more than what I was going to school for, so it just made sense.
“I made a five-year plan and decided to go with it, and it’s been going well.”
While Swan has no plans for big stardom, she does dream of playing with her idols.
“I don’t really have any aspirations of playing venues like the ACC – Massey Hall would be great, or opening for Gordon Lightfoot – just ‘a living, not a killing,’ bringing music that people like to nice audiences around the country,” she said.
Swan has played a few festivals and been in TV placements, though really she’d like to play the big stage in Canmore.
“I’ve been trying to get into the Canmore folk festival – if there’s one festival in Canada everyone wants to play, apparently it’s Canmore – at least from Ontario,” she said. “It’s not the biggest festival, it’s the one everyone wants to play at.”
“I grew up near Orillia, which hosts the Mariposa Folk Festival, and it’s a little bigger than Canmore, and people in Toronto know how awesome Mariposa is, and Canmore would be a similar kind of festival. And everyone wants to go to the mountains!”
Swan is now working on her next album.
“It’s almost completely written and the plan is to have another full-length album within a year and a half,” she said.
