Best Female Solo Artist

Jenn Grant calls from a Toronto streetcar, hours before her Canadian Music Week show where she was joined on stage by a bunch of fellow musicians, including Six Shooter labelmate Melissa McClelland, Ruth Minnikin and Kevin Hearn. The next morning, before going to shoot a new video in Pickering, Grant reports back that the show was amazing. This past year was a whirlwind for Grant---and she’s “brain-dead” from the night before---so much so that she has a hard time recalling 2008. She remembers (and so do we) her “fun and funny” aerobic Billy Ocean dance with Lori Curtis, closing out last year’s In The Dead of Winter festival. Grant also remembers recording Echoes, on a farm in Schomberg, Ontario, where the band---Sean MacGillivray, Kinley Dowling and Dave Christensen---slept in bunk beds and played with animals. It’s all sweetly captured on video, in case Grant really gets amnesia. But one thing Grant never forgets is graciousness, and she wants to thank “her band, The Coast and the good people of Halifax---you’re beautiful.”