Sarah MacDougall has already had some great times in Prince George. Now she has a couple of special concerts for the Canada Winter Games to deepen that affection she already feels for B.C.'s northern capital, as she travels down from an even more northerly capital. Although she was born in Sweden, then moved in her youth to the Lower Mainland, she now calls Whitehorse home.
MacDougall has been setting herself up in a bright light in the relatively new field of electro-folk. That's a hybrid of urban synth-pop and traditional acoustic instruments. In this musical genre, the recording studio is not just a place where microphones gather in the guitars and drums and whatnot, it is an instrument itself.
This marriage of old-school instruments and modern effects are evident in her latest single churning the national airwaves these days: I Want To See The Light (featuring fellow Swedish-Canadian chanteuse Erika Angell on guest vocals) from her forthcoming album.
She'll be giving some sneak peeks of the new collection on Feb. 18 at the free outdoor show at Canada Games Plaza opening for Alex Cuba, then Feb. 19 at her headline concert at Art Space. She will also hearken fans back to her highly acclaimed stuff from The Greatest Ones Alive (2011), Across The Atlantic (2009) and perhaps even the 2008 EP I Don't Want To Be Alone Anymore.
"I'm so excited. I played Art Space a couple of years back, but it has been awhile. It feels like a long time so I'm looking forward to returning," she said. "I was in P.G. once when Def Leppard was in town and my friend and I ended up partying at a bar downtown. (It was the now defunct Sgt. O'Flaherty's Pub.) Some of the band came in and they were playing darts with us. They invited us back to their tour bus when they found out we were musicians so we ended up jamming on djembes and acoustic guitars for a long time on the Def Leppard bus."
MacDougall will be in amongst some large names in music again, with an 18-day schedule of accomplished and award-winning Canadian musicians on the Canada Winter Games / Cold Snap Festival. She was not yet a resident of Whitehorse when that Yukon city was the host of the 2007 edition of the Games, so she can't wait to be part of the atmosphere.
"I was very happy, very excited, to be picked for a big event like that. I've never been to a Canada Games event before, I see a lot of amazing musician names on the list," she said.
She has always been connected in some way to the culture of winter. She was raised in a nordic country, and even though Canada is considered a wintery place, the Lower Mainland wasn't quite the deep-freeze that Whitehorse is. When she went through a relationship breakup a few years ago, and a friend invited her up to Whitehorse for some recuperation and creative rebooting, she fell into place there.
"And I love the north. Yes its cold, but it is an amazing place with lots of amazing people," she said.
She was finished with school anyway. It was time to take all the lessons of the Simon Fraser University music department (she chose it, she said, "because they have a more avant-garde program") and put them into career practice.
"I enjoyed the academic side of music," she said. "My intent was to find a language to speak to other musicians within the framework of my songwriting. I felt handicapped because I felt this barrier in communication between what I was thinking and how to explain that to other musicians, and the academics really helped me with that. That program opened me up to all sorts of things I'd never thought of and heard of before."
Now she is a sought-after collaborator in the Whitehorse area, working with well known Arctic acts like Gordie Tentrees, Kim Barlow, Bob Hamilton and others. But what they do and what she does are not exactly a perfect match. Her studio sense and sound-layering is unique and worldly, as might be expected from someone who has a strong sense of travelling the world, being at home in multiple cultures, and comfortable in both urban and rural settings.
It might seem stunning to the domestic lay-person, but it feels normal to her that this conversation happened in Sweden where she is hanging out with family and friends, only hours after arriving there from a trip to Africa, and before that she was in Edmonton, Iqaluit, Toronto, Costa Rica, Sweden, Halifax, and about to go to Germany, then here to B.C. All that was in a matter of a few months and almost none of it involved performing concerts. She will have a pent up urge to blast the songs out, she said. Without Def Leppard, she'll be relying on local people and the visitors from all over Canada to make her latest set of P.G. memories.
