Leona Burkey knows it couldn’t have happened any other way. A self-described musical offspring of Brandi Carlile and Jimmy Rankin, the singer-songwriter swam against the popular current, coming home to Nova Scotia to launch her music career (instead of the common reverse route). Her landing on the scene was interpolated with the arrival of her children (something that makes many artists press pause); splitting herself between the two earned her a style she describes as renegade mom folk—a tagline people have shouted back at her from the packed houses she plays for.
“I find in my live shows over the years, what has been happening is: If it's a concert, I somehow turn it into a pub kind of feel. Like, really light-hearted and joyful. And if it's a pub situation, I flip that into a concert: Like it's a really chatty, spontaneous kind of thing. A couple of people recently have said ‘You remind me of Steve Poltz, but you’re a girl,” says Burkey, who can often be found holding the stage at Celtic Corner—that is, when she’s not getting herself nominated for ECMAs and Music Nova Scotia awards for her take on what she calls the “Cape Breton troubadour tradition.” (Burkey grew up on the island.)
But it isn’t just Burkey’s live performance that’s worth getting excited about. There’s also her latest album, Groundrush. “For me personally, songwriting—and especially playing live shows—is beyond a compulsion. For me it has been my whole life,” she says. “ I've done some crazy things over the years to keep my stick on the ice,” Burkey adds, mentioning she’s played many golf resorts “because they had pools!” for her kids, she says with a laugh. With Groundrush, it feels like that perseverance “even though I couldn’t always make the scene”, as she puts it, paid off.
Burkey chose the album's title—a term she described as “loosely defined, comes from skydiving types and describes the sensation of the ground suddenly rushing up at you all at once, even though it seemed so far away just moments before (whilst jumping out of planes and such)” because it mimics the way time tends to speed up and bottleneck as one ages. The album’s 10 tracks feel like signposts to carry with you, markers for the path you’ll soon be forging through uncharted territory as you map your own against-the current path.
This is never truer than with the album’s title track, which Burkey describes as “a buck up against time going by too quickly: that sensation” by “being blindly optimistic enough to think that you’re gonna win.”
Here, in a music video exclusively debuted with The Coast that acts as the album’s latest single, Burkey brings enough of her renowned live energy to wreck your weekly screen time with a watch-on-repeat take on “Groundrush”:
