When Naomi Kavka performs a song, she commits her body and being to it.
For all her work with other artists - in the past she was half of modern folk acts The Arbitrarys (with Josh Sandu) and PowerDuo (with Corbin Spensley), principal cello with the PGSO, and is in the Kym Gouchie support band The Northern Sky - she has never released a full-length album all her own. The prevailing reason was an inability to wholly commit to such a solo project.
This past year, the commitment winds blew. She was in a position to take the material she'd written over recent times and lay it down in the studio with a full band. That was how she'd always heard these songs in her head, so she didn't want to shortchange her imagination lest she shortchange her audience.
Slammed Doors & Severance is, in an odd way, her debut record. It all came together because a compatible group of musicians from the area gathered around Kavka's material and gave her that fulsome sound to which she'd always aspired.
"I was waiting for the right time and the right people around me, and some confidence, too," she said, a surprising admission for someone who's been to Memorial University of Newfoundland and back turning music into a profession for the past 10-plus years.
She said the past year or so had caused her to question if she even wanted to continue with the art form as a career aspiration. "I was having a complicated relationship with music, but I got things figured out. I did a full 180 and now I want to play music more than ever."
Singer/guitarist Spensley's unwavering collaboration was one of the reasons why, as was the eager action of drummer Justin Gendreau, bassist Keith Rodger, and the final piece to her imagination's puzzle was keyboard player Patrick Kilcullen. Together, they gelled into her perfect posse. Guest guitarist Blake "Big Fancy" Bamford jumped in with some choice cuts of lap steel on a couple of tunes.
All these collaborators are from the local region and so, too, was the recording process a northern endeavor, albeit at the edge of the earth.
"We did a lot of the recording in Haida Gwaii," Kavka said. "In Port Clements there is a great parlor piano. It was an old player-piano but all the mechanics had been removed which actually gave us a lot of room inside for placing microphones, and it was just out of tune enough for what we were going for. It was really complementary to the whole aesthetic of the album."
To get a sense of that atmosphere, YouTube has the leadoff single already out in the world. It's the alt-country/progressive folk song Strongback, and it has some prominent sprinkling of Kilcullen on that barrelhouse pianer.
"I think Patrick was more proud of the whole thing than I was. He had a lot of fun on this, and that was so important for me," she said. "When the fellas came out to Haida Gwaii, I had hopes for getting four songs done. We ended up getting nine done. Everything just rolled because everyone clicked. They all got what was going on, and it was actually kind of magic. We are all such good friends now because of all this. I really like albums like The Basement Tapes (by Bob Dylan and The Band) recorded at their house, Big Pink, and Exile On Main Street (by the Rolling Stones) recorded in a villa in France that was once occupied by the Nazis during the Second World War. Albums like that take you into that space. The music feels like it's played around one microphone and the listener is sitting in the room. The camaraderie of the musicians has a vibe, and that's what I was hoping for, and we got it."
Some of the additional recording was done at a cabin in Fort Fraser, some in Kavka's living room in the Central Fort George neighbourhood, and the finishing touches were done at Cheslatta Records just north the city with Rick Irvine at the controls.
She also turned to local talent for the mixing and mastering. Connor Pritchard did those duties at his Edgewood Audio facility.
Kavka has been recently taking watercolour painting lessons from Katie Zammit, a multi-genre artist well known for her skin art at Handsome Cabin Boy Tattoo. Zammit worked with images Kavka provided to design the album art for Slammed Doors & Severance.
The executive producer of the project is Sean Adams.
"The cover image is the deer hide I'm working on," Kavka said. "Murray Gable (singer-songwriter and member of local band The Pucks) gave it to me. I'm stretching it out. He and I talk a lot about hunting and trapping and treating hides and songs."
Local filmmaker and performing artist Eliza Houg helped create the Strongback video, and Kavka promises more to go along with the 10 songs on the new album. Some of the songs have seen public life on other releases, but never with a full band arrangement. In all those senses, familiar Naomi Kavka is brand new even to her longstanding fans.
The full effect is available Saturday night starting at 9 p.m. at the Legion. Kavka will perform the entire album plus some other tunes. The opening act is friend and frequent collaborator Kym Gouchie. Admission is $10 and the CDs will be available for $15. It can be downloaded now at the Bandcamp website.
Following the Prince George album release show, Kavka and Spensley are off on Via Rail and other modes of transportation to tour all the way to Newfoundland & Labrador. She has not performed in her second hometown of St. John's since 2014.
