The last time Amy Thiessen was in Prince George, she and her band caught a slick patch of highway and totalled their vehicle. But true to her centred yoga mind and road warrior troubadour heart, she only missed one concert on that tour and is now anxious to come back to P.G.
Her return happens Wednesday at Nancy O's, and she comes with new gifts - a set of fresh songs on her recently-released album In Between Goodbyes. She is blowing in on a wind of comparisons to Jewel and fellow Calgarian Jann Arden.
"My music tends to come from introspection. I do a lot of contemplating," she said, and she has a lot to think about with all the experiences she's gone through on her way to this album. She grew up in a staunchly conservative Alberta agriculture family, but became a vegetarian. She got a degree in commerce, but acted on an urge to feed her brain less tangible material than numbers and formulas and systems. So she booked a flight to India, and set off a fuse that's been burning in her life ever since.
"The whole goal of that trip was not set in stone, it was just taking space and checking into what my soul wanted instead of what my brain wanted to do," she said.
She discovered a passion for yoga and for music. She had always been an amateur singer, but at 26 years of age she picked up the guitar too. "Every week I went to open mic to be in front of people and build my skill set. Vocally I've been singing since I was a pup, but only in the last year have I truly felt like I'm a musician."
All the while she was learning the guitar, she was also learning the finer points of yoga, to the point she is now an active teacher. Frequently she will combine music inside a yoga studio, often invited in for ultra acoustic yoga concerts at studios on her tour routes.
"It is a creatively charged place to play and it is, like freeeekin' fun," she said "In those spaces you get to do things you don't get to do in regular song-writing."
She calls the two sides of her career the two sides of her coin. She flips constantly between the two, but they have the same value for her. She also likes to journal, so her river of consciousness is getting out somehow into words she can express later in physical movement and the sounds of song.
"I tell stories but they are very personal," she explained. "I am very contemplative, I lean towards the melancholy, and I tend to go deep into stuff. When you tap into the place where its super honest, that's where it's going to be relatable to other people."
