>>PREVIEW
KARLA ANDERSON
Tuesday, February 21
Ironwood Stage and Grill
There is a spirit that guides Karla Anderson. Five years ago she had no TV, and today, her songs garner hundreds of e-mails due to her television performance.
Then, she was a stay-at-home mom to three sons, with chickens and horses on an acreage, helping run her husband’s carpentry business and home schooling their kids.
Now the hubby has been traded for melodies, the chicken coop for studio space, and the stay-at-home existence has been exchanged for sanity and bliss. The three sons, however, are non-negotiable. After all, there is a spirit that guides Karla Anderson.
On a recent Saturday morning, Anderson was shown again on national television performing "What Else Can I Do?" the song that caused viewers in Israel, Germany and South Africa to jam her computer with e-mail when it was first shown a year ago on the series Joan of Arcadia. When she received hundreds of e-mails within days of the 15-second scrap of song being aired on the show, she thought at first that her jammed in-box meant her computer had a virus.
Just like the first time around, Anderson again missed the airing of the song last week, although another spate of e-mail from across Canada let her know others did not. Instead of watching TV, she was being served breakfast in bed by son Matthew, 9, who fed her tea and oranges that came all the way from Edmonton. No matter how much the universe rearranges your life, some things are unshakable – Anderson still does not own a television.
It’s all a sweet mix of normalcy and surreality for the down-to-earth Anderson, who found a good counsellor and a good book, The Artist’s Way, that led her to connect with both the stage and psyches worldwide.
"We had a life I loved, and when it all fell apart I had to kind of figure out what I was going to do when I grew up," Anderson says about the breakup of her marriage a few years ago.
Married young, a mom at 19, it was only in 2001 that Anderson began to write songs – songs to connect with people’s hearts around the world.
"I had been home and really loved that part about staying at home, but I
also became kind of an extremist, totally giving up whatever I may be (for)
being a mother. I guess that’s pretty old fashioned, but I did it," she says.
"I must have been going through my mid-life crisis. I started doing The Artist’s Way, and started counselling at that time because I was feeling that I was going to go hang myself in the barn. I was really depressed.
"I got rid of all our chickens and I redid the chicken coop and made myself a music room and it was far enough away from the house that if I went out there at night no one would follow me. And I started to write and stare at the wall, and I don’t know what was going on in there, but that book was really powerful, the right thing at the right time."
She eventually braved open stages in Edmonton and later started her own in nearby Stony Plain, so she wouldn’t have to drive so far. A couple of opening gigs caught the right ears, and she found herself onstage at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival just a fingerful of years after she wrote her first song in the former chicken coop.
Along the way, she used money from her divorce to record an album. Instead, she met up with mentor Neil MacGonigill who organized a two-day drive-by recording session at Jeth Weinrich’s Red Motel Embassy. She met her band just hours off the plane. Miles Wilkinson, engineer on both Co-Dependents live CDs, flew in from Nashville with drummer Kenny Malone, who played with John Prine, Don Williams and on Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime.
Of walking into the room to meet her band, Anderson is characteristically up front.
"I was terrified, but on the other hand, I had spent a year and a half in the studio, and it will never see the light of day."
While the tedious process of the first layered studio recording had Anderson questioning whether she could even sing, in contrast, the result of the two days of live recording in Calgary last April leaves no doubt that her voice, and heart, soar into the music. The songs from the resulting The Embassy Sessions prompted the e-mail outpouring.
"When we just got in there, honestly something was going on in the room. It was a spiritual thing. Sometimes it’s not really about music – it’s about this kind of journey, about whatever you have to learn. And I walked in there and this peace settled on the room and we fell in there around one another.
"Fear is about what you think you should be. But if you allow things to happen, it happens, it’s not about you. Pretty soon I realized you are just a little speck in what’s going on."
For such a little speck, Anderson and her songs continue to connect to hearts around the world. |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.