In looking to move her career forward, Ottawa’s Amanda Rheaume looked to the past for inspiration for her new album, Keep A Fire.
Many roots and folk artists look to familial connections when putting pen to paper in songwriting mode – but not all of those artists have as interesting a family tree as Rheaume boasts.
For example, her great great grandfather was a founding father of Manitoba and friend of Louis Riel, while her grandfather was navigator on the icebreaker HMCS Labrador, the first ship to circumnavigate North America in 1954 via the Panama Canal.
Rheaume (vocals, guitar), along with Fraser Holmes (vocals, mandolin) plays Banff’s Elk and Oarsman, Sunday (Nov. 17) and Canmore’s Good Earth Café, Nov. 20. The pair have been making their way across Canada to Vancouver in a Toyota Sienna van on the western leg of her Keep A Fire tour.
Keep A Fire, which was released in July, follows Light Of Another Day (2011), Kiss Me Back and Acoustic Christmas (2009) and her debut If You Never Live (2007).
Like most children, she said from Lake Louise, Thursday (Nov. 7), when young, stories from her grandparents were just that, stories. Since then, though, she’s learned so much more about her family’s lineage.
“My grandfather would tell a lot of stories on my dad’s side and I’ve learned more about the Rheaume side of the family. And while I’ve been touring, I’ve been meeting more family; cousins and others I haven’t met before. I have a lot of family out west in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Actually, playing in Olds was like a homecoming.”
Rheaume also pays tribute to her Métis heritage with “Keep a Fire in the Rain,” a pulsing piece about her grandfather and Ojibway great grandmother who lived exactly halfway between the reserve and a mine site in God’s Lake, Man. – because the mixed-race couple wasn’t welcome in either community.
With “A.G.B. Bannatyne,” she offers an ode to her great great grandfather, friend of Louis Riel and who hosted the province’s early legislative sessions in his home – and after whom Bannatyne Ave. in Winnipeg is named.
With “Not this Time,” Rheaume describes a harrowing voyage across Great Slave Lake taken by her paternal great grandparents, who were on route from Nelson House, Man. to a Hudson Bay posting in Fort Norman, NWT. Her great grandmother and six children travelled on a barge attached to a paddle wheeler, while her great grandfather helped shovel coal on the boat.
When a storm hit, both the barge and the family were set adrift for two days until they were reunited with the boat and her great grandfather.
The seeds of Keep a Fire were planted in December of 2011 when Rheaume traveled over the Northwest Passage in a Hercules aircraft while en route to play for troops in Alert. Seeing the passage from above made her reflect on her maternal grandfather, Thomas Arthur Irvine, who had been a navigator on board HMCS Labrador.
“With Keep A Fire, the sentiment is to keep family stories alive,” she said. “If we don’t document or pass them on, they can be lost, it’s a bit of a lost art.
“I’ve been in a phase where people are passing; the grandfather I wrote the songs about passed away recently. When I was doing research, I’d call him and say ‘can you re-tell that? I want to take notes.’
“A great aunt (Adeline Rheaume) wrote Another Kind of Rainbow: The Story of a Canadiam Family’s Multi-cultural Roots and I wanted to delved into what she might have felt.”
With research in hand, Rheaume met with co-writer John MacDonald to work on Keep A Fire. “I had notes and notes and ideas and I’d say to John ‘what do you think about this or that?’
“Things were really tough then and it shows how much we take for granted. People might think things are tough, but it’s nothing like taking nine kids 3,000 miles north. It’s all fascinating and I have more respect now for how I came to be.”
Keep A Fire was about a year and a half of work, she said, and, being on about a two-year cycle of new albums, she said she may return to historical context again. “Not necessarily my family,” she said, “but maybe songs connected to Canadian history and its people. A lot of it depends on funding.”
Rheaume won $40,000 in Live 88.5’s 2008 Big Money Shot competition. She began releasing EPs in 2007, culminating in a fundraising Christmas collection for Boys and Girls Clubs of Ottawa that sold 6,500 copies locally. For the past several years, she has organized Ottawa’s Bluebird North songwriter showcases, co-organized Babes for Breasts concerts and recording projects to raise money for breast cancer. She’s also performed for troops in Afghanistan three times and raised money on tour for the families of military personnel.
