Wiikwemkoong musician and Juno winner Crystal Shawanda will be performing at the Coulson in downtown Sudbury Aug. 6.
The show is presented by Sudbury Performance Group.
“We are extremely excited to be bringing Crystal up to Sudbury to perform for Northern Ontario residents as part of our Her Northern Voice music festival,” said the group’s president, Mark Mannisto, in a press release. “Crystal is a true northern gem. She is an ambassador to Northern Ontario, and we are proud to bring her talents to Sudbury.”
There’s a tendency these days to try to pigeonhole any artist that attempts to breach the boundaries.
Chalk it up to the restrictions of radio playlists, or the media’s attempt to strictly define musicians by the music it believes artists ought to be making, creative instincts be damned.
Nevertheless, Crystal Shawanda opted to defy those demands and chart her own path forward. Initially signed to RCA in 2007, she hit her stride as a country singer and songwriter when she scored a top 20 hit with her song “You Can Let Go” and subsequently tallied sales of over 50,000 copies of her debut album Dawn of a New Day, and subsequently debuted in the Billboard Top 20.
Nevertheless, she began to realize that the blues had captured her muse, and with that, she left the label, shifted her stance, and began recording albums that reflected her love of blues and her natural affinity for that sound.
As she once told an interviewer, “the whole time I was singing Patsy Cline on stage, I was singing Etta James at home.”
Her new album, Church House Blues, reflects that dedication and devotion, and finds her co-writing seven of the 10 songs on the album.
Produced by her husband, collaborator and co-writer Dewayne Strobel, it not only marks her fourth blues effort to date, but one of her most demonstrative, as well.
That’s evident at the outset, from the fiery delivery of the title track, the riveting drive of “New Orleans Is Sinking,” and the assertive strains of “Rather Be Alone,” to the quiet, contemplative desire and despair that scorches “Evil Memory,” the radio-ready hooks illuminated in “Hey Love,” and the emotive strains instilled in the bittersweet ballads, “When It Comes To Love” and “Bigger Than the Blues.”
At the centre of it all is Crystal’s evocative vocals, a powerful, provocative force of nature that elevates each encounter and sends the album’s entries soaring towards the stratosphere.
Shawanda will be performing at the Coulson Entertainment Centre on Saturday, Aug. 6 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 each and can be purchased through the Sudbury Performance Group website.
