Slow Release

Shy-Anne Hovorka’s New Songs are Musical Snapshots in Time

The fact that Shy-Anne Hovorka is releasing an album’s worth of new music in 2021 initially came as much of a surprise to her as it likely did her fans.

Hovorka, who lives and works in Nipigon and is a member of Opwaaganasiniing, officially retired from working full time in the music business back in 2014. Although she hasn’t completely walked away from music or performing—she’s collaborated with the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra and done other select shows in the intervening years—the music she’s currently releasing off of her forthcoming album and then… is her first foray back into the album-recording cycle in about seven years. It came about after doing a pair of COVIDera shows this summer, including the city’s Live on the Waterfront from the downtown north core parkade. “I’ve never stopped writing, and I’ve got quite a few songs that I’ve written,” she says. “The drummer that I work with just said ‘well, why don’t we come out with another album’ and I thought about it for a bit and I was just like ‘guess there’s really no reason why we can’t.’”

To promote the album—which features longtime collaborators Jordan Elcheson on guitar and Josh Hogan on percussion, along with newcomer Michael Lyngstad on bass as well as help on keyboards from Liesl Timko—Hovorka is slowly releasing the album song by song over the next several months. Half of the album’s songs are being premiered every two weeks on CBC Thunder Bay’s morning show, after which they’ll all be available online. The full album release, Hovorka says, is slated for December.

The songs themselves, the singer-songwriter says, cover a wide range of topics—“they’re all over the place”—and reflect how Hovorka has changed as an artist, with each track almost acting like a snapshot of a particular moment. “I’ve become a mom, I’m in my

40s, and my perspective on life is very different,” she says. “It’s more of like this compilation of a life journey over the last […] six, seven years.” The first single, “Warrior’s Lullaby,” is written in honour of the children who didn’t come home from residential schools, as well as the survivors. That song, Hovorka says, also led to another of the album’s tracks, “Crying Bones,” which came directly from her son, Rex.

“My son was listening to me play it and he’s just like ‘Oh, mom, that makes my bones cry, I have crying bones,’” Hovorka says, adding that after hugging him, she grabbed her guitar again so mother and child could work out the chorus. “He started singing and he legitimately came up with the chorus on ‘Crying Bones,’ and then we wrote the rest of the song around it, which is a little bit more on the political side than I would typically write,” she says. Other tracks on the album deal with topics as varied as the death of a friend, a song written while on her honeymoon shortly after her 2014 retirement, and others “inspired by the little things in life.”

Check out Shy-Anne Hovorka at shy-anne.com and on YouTube at youtube.com/user/shysmusic. Follow her on Facebook @shysmusic.