Andrea Ramolo was enjoying happy times the last time she was in Prince George to perform her music.
She is in happy times now, as she sets herself to return to P.G. tonight. But there was darkness in between. There was personal turmoil - bottoms falling out of relationships. It left her questioning, for awhile, every step she took in life. And sometimes it was just hard to breathe from the choke of heartbreak.
That which does not kill an artist makes her overflowing with material. Nothing soothes the deep cuts of wounded love like turning it into a song. The writer can take those aches and reshape them into melody, rhythm, lyric and staging.
A creator can take off the clothes of a heartbreak and render those emotions naked or, in Ramolo's case, nuda. It's the Italian word for naked and it's Ramolo's word for her latest album.
"I have to be honest," she told The Citizen in a phone conversation before her departure from her home base in Toronto. She had just finished doing the first concerts with Nuda content, in Nova Scotia and P.E.I. where she has many friends and supporters.
"Before going out there to play the first show, I was nervous," she confessed. "Of course it is always exhilarating and nerve wracking to play new songs. This album is so personal to me. It's quite, you know, a private experience that I'm sharing, and it's quite a dark album with glimpses of hope. It's an album of empowerment and strength and identity as well as a heartbreak album, but at this point in my career I'm really bearing my soul, it is always open to interpretation, and at the one end I don't really care if people like it but on the other end I really want to connect with people because that's why I play music to begin with.
"That's why I make art and that's why I write, right? So I'm stuck in the middle between that sort of feeling and some bluntly honest things. I'm travelling the country with this newfound confidence in myself. Just as a crafter of the arts and as a musician, I feel really comfortable with that. The only really scary thing is baring my soul the way I have to. So it's a fragile place to be."
Ramolo has been a dedicated songwriter for years, but Nuda's biographical themes represented a new level of personal disclosure in the songs. She was already a strong folk-pop composer, evidenced by collaborations with Tom Wilson's alter ego Lee Harvey Osmond and her work in Scarlett Jane with duo partner Cindy Doire. That five-year-old project is still alive, but she and Doire wanted to pursue some individual directions before their next reconvening, and perfectly timed came this new set of songs for Ramolo which she knew were too much just herself to, as she put it, "impose" on Doire.
Deep biography was a technique she had used before, but when she was just starting out in music.
Ramolo was focused on being a dancer and actor, in her early youth, and loved to write poetry.
When her mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2003, Ramolo poured her fears and anguish out in the form of song. It came out in her solo 2008 album Thank You For The Ride.
Her music turned out to be compelling and audience engaging. She got the attention of noted songwriter-producer Tim Thorney who helped her record and distribute 2011's The Shadows And The Cracks, which earned Ramolo a nomination at the Canadian Folk Music Awards.
She picked up two more CFMA nominations over the course of two more albums under the Scarlett Jane umbrella. So it was no surprise to the outside audience, although it was a sheer delight for her, when one of Canada's most acclaimed songwriter-producers signed on for this latest project.
She needed someone with an acute understanding of both personal material and dark matter.
Who better than Michael Timmins, co-founder of Cowboy Junkies? The connection Timmins forged with the project was so intuitive and substantial that they made two albums out of one. Once the first package was complete, Timmins and Ramolo did a second version but stripped down the instrumentation and let the songs stand, well, naked.
"He's a fantastic producer of artists. He wants their voice and their sound. The guy's a genius. I would work with him again in a second," she said.
There is a fearful next step, though. After making an album, the artist then has to present it to the world and represent it on stage. She has a strong set of friends on the east coast so she went there first, only a couple of weeks ago, to turn Nuda into a live act. They helped her ease into that travelling phase. Now she has the introductory jitters out of the way and can let the songs connect on their own merits.
"The people who connect are the people with whom I want to connect," she said. "They are looking for truth, they are looking to purge, and they are looking to express and to go deep within themselves and to examine themselves as a human being, and others. It's important to question. It's important to feel."
The Ramolo connection happens tonight at the Prince George Playhouse. Her bandmate is songwriter Matt Epp. They also get opening act Sean Robinson, the Prince George phenom who won the 2016 Limelight Quest competition, plus jazzy headliner Coco Love Alcorn coming in to present her latest album Wonderland.
