Norma MacDonald Shares New Single, “The Heart Wants”
Nova Scotia’s Norma MacDonald has unveiled her new single, “The Heart Wants,” from her upcoming album, In Waves.
“Sometimes songs get kicked around and toyed with for years before they find a home on a recording. wrote “The Heart Wants” back in 2011 for my third album, Morning You Wake, but I couldn’t manage to capture the right feel for it at that time. Over the years, I’ve tried arranging and producing it in all sorts of different ways, but it never quite worked. The lyrics follow a very loose stream-of-consciousness about the ineffability of longing, and I wanted the sound to be weightless and ethereal.”
“I really wanted to give this song one more shot because I always felt it had something. In the end, my producer Dan Ledwell and the current iteration of my band managed to capture that hazy, dreamy sound I’ve been looking for.”
Norma’s sixth album, In Waves, is set for release on October 27, and starts in deep winter and moves through moods and seasons to a hopeful autumn harvest.
Watch the video for “The Heart Wants” below and learn more about Norma via our Five Questions With segment.
Care to introduce yourself to our readers?
I’m Norma MacDonald, a folky singer-songwriter living in Halifax, NS (Originally from Cape Breton Island, which as a Cape Bretoner, I always say compulsively after saying I live in Halifax). I’m releasing my sixth album In Waves on October 27. I live in a one-bedroom apartment with my partner and two cats. My partner is also a musician (Chad Peck from indie-shoegaze band Kestrels) and we have a lot of guitars in our relatively small space. We both weirdly also have jobs as public servants; I’m a nurse, and he’s a high school teacher. Our lives are busy and full and satisfying. I very much compartmentalize these different parts of my life and I love the feeling when I flip to switch between the two of them.
Tell us a bit about your most recent release.
The majority of the songs on In Waves were written during the pandemic lockdown. To keep ourselves from losing our minds, Chad and I started doing these “song challenges” where we would go into different rooms and have to write 3 songs in 3 hours. Then we would meet in the living room and play the finished products for each other. As someone who has a hard time finishing songs, it was a really good exercise for me to just write something from start to finish and worry about the details later. Obviously those were anxious times for everybody. Working as an ER nurse, I felt like a jangly ball of nerves 24/7. You can hear a lot of that anxiety in the lyrics to some of the songs, especially, “Comes in Waves” and “Blues and Greens”. But there’s also some hope and gratitude and love on there too 🙂
Once we started recording at Dan Ledwell’s Echo Lake Studio, it felt like all the anxiety melted away from the songs. He brought a lightness to everything that I really haven’t been able to capture on a recording before. Between Dan and my incredible and hilarious band, we had a lot of fun making this record.
Where do you tend to pull inspiration from when writing?
I get a lot of inspiration from nature. My most prolific writing times are always around the change of seasons. Something about the change in the air makes me think about things I forgot to think about for the previous few months. I’m also a pretty avid reader, and I tend to “borrow” ideas and phrases from things I’m reading and flesh them out into songs
Do you have any upcoming shows you’d like to tell us about?
I’m playing an album release show at The Sanctuary Arts Centre in Dartmouth, NS on November 11. It’s a beautiful old converted church that sounds amazing. It will be the first time my band and I will be playing a lot of the songs on In Waves live together. We’re really looking forward to it. I’m planning on some touring in Eastern Canada in the Spring of 2024 (I don’t tour in winter because I’m a total chicken about driving in bad weather) and am hoping to book a UK tour in the Fall of 2024.
What’s your goal for the remainder of 2023?
My goals for releasing records are always pretty modest– to have my music heard by a slightly wider audience, to play a few new venues, to tour a little more than last time (my previous album Old Future was released in April 2020 so obviously there was no touring for that album, so that should be easy to beat). I really just want my music career to be sustainable enough that I can continue to write songs, play shows with my friends and make each record a little better than the last.
Connect with Norma MacDonald:
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