Madeleine Roger’s debut solo album Cottonwood is rich with the influence of the nature she surrounded herself with while writing it. The warm acoustic guitar and sweet vocal harmonies of the Winnipeg singer/songwriter will have the listener feeling transported to her great-grandparents’ cabin in the woods, stoking the wood stove to keep the room warm enough for Roger to play another song. Which makes sense, because that cabin is where Roger wrote the album.
Unplugging from the distractions of internet, cell phones, and electricity, Roger was in her element and inspired by what she calls the “marvellous routine” of daily life at the cabin. Chores like chopping wood and opening a hole in the ice to get her daily water were the only tasks to accomplish before she was able to sit and write for the rest of the day.
“In the winter, or even late fall or early spring, there’s either almost nobody on the lake or literally nobody on the lake,” says Roger. “It’s my favourite place to go because I have complete solitude.”
Roger turns to nature to decompress. She drove to Virginia to take a kayak-building course halfway through the recording process of Cottonwood. Although she may not be bringing her kayak with her, she will definitely be taking some time to appreciate the wonders of the west coast when her tour takes her here.
“Thankfully, I am somebody who enjoys living out of a suitcase, but I’m trying to get better at actually taking time off while on tour,” says Roger. “What I’ve been noticing is that every national park in Canada has a good reason for being a national park and that they’re well worth seeing and well worth going out of the way for. So something we’ve taken to doing is just en route taking that maybe 100 kilometres off the main highway to go check out these incredible places that are so spectacularly reserved from development.”
Cottonwood was proudly created with gender parity; half of the musicians contributing to this album identify as female. Roger says this may not have had a discernible effect on the sound of the album, but it was important to her that the collaborative process was representative of her audience.
“I was sort of sick of opening the liner notes to albums and just seeing a bunch of men involved, for the most part,” she says. “Everybody on the album noticed the difference because so often it’s maybe one woman with a whole bunch of men around. It just became this really easy process and everybody remarked on how nice it was to just feel more at home. That’s a bit of a convoluted way to basically just say that it felt really comfortable.”
Roger’s advice to aspiring artists and musicians who are feeling underrepresented is simple and achievable: even if they are harder to find, seek out those people to collaborate with who believe in the same things you do. The parts of the creative process that can be challenging are so much easier when you have a team that backs you up.
“Why does there need to be another album in the world? Why does there need to be another singer/songwriter? Well, everyone has something individual to say, and especially the people who are underrepresented; we need those voices to be so much louder. I think it’s just having the gumption to do what we know is important even if it’s hard, even if there’s people who speak up against it.”
Roger says that for the concert here, guitarist Logan McKillop will join her, and that the show will be more than just music.
“There’s definitely going to be some storytelling,” she says, “so if you want to hear the stories behind the songs, that’s a part of the live show.”
Madeleine Roger
7 pm Friday, November 9
$10, Vinyl Envy
vinylenvy.com