{"id":10279,"date":"2016-02-22T17:20:55","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T17:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=10279"},"modified":"2016-02-22T17:20:55","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T17:20:55","slug":"frazey-ford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2016\/02\/22\/frazey-ford\/","title":{"rendered":"Frazey Ford"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fraze<\/p>\n

By Rachel Narvey<\/strong><\/p>\n

Frazey Ford joins me on the phone a week into the new year. When I ask how 2016 is going, she confesses that for the past few days she\u2019s been in bed with a cold. \u201cI\u2019m just coming out of it,\u201d she says. \u201cI feel a bit like a newborn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hearing her voice, you\u2019d never know she\u2019d been sick. Ford speaks with a warmth that instantly suggests her signature musical blend of folk and soul. You only have to play the first minute of a Frazey Ford song before someone in the room turns to you, a little bit in awe, and asks \u201cwho <\/span>is <\/span><\/i>this?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ford has released two albums since she began her career as a solo artist: <\/span>Obadiah <\/span><\/i>(2010) and more recently, <\/span>Indian Ocean <\/span><\/i>(2014). To Ford, the newer of the two feels a lot closer emotionally. The songs on <\/span>Indian Ocean <\/span><\/i>took her two years to write, a process she describes as intensive and tricky. It\u2019s a testament to her proficiency that the album sounds so natural, with lyrics that flow one after another with a breezy certainty.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI probably have hundreds of unfinished songs,\u201d Ford admits. \u201cIt seems like the ones that want to be born will pester me. Sometimes I\u2019ll start writing a song and I\u2019ll get nowhere with it, but then six months or a year later I\u2019ll realize that I had to go through something in order to figure out where the song was going. I had to grow, I had to evolve.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Growth is a strong theme in Ford\u2019s music, whether it\u2019s reconnecting with the natural world, or casting off a past love who\u2019s been nothing but trouble. Ford recorded <\/span>Indian Ocean <\/span><\/i>with the Hodges brothers, a group of musicians whose sound Ford idolized from an early age. For the songwriter, the opportunity was immensely exciting, but also the source of a lot of anxiety.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was really stepping into an unknown situation for myself,\u201d Ford says. \u201cI\u2019ve been able to retroactively be like \u2018Holy crap that was an amazing experience,\u2019 but at the time I was so scared that I found it difficult to relax into what was going on. It was terrifying, but in the end there\u2019s an artistic kind of voice that makes itself known. A voice that has a clear path and its own trajectory no matter how much doubt I felt in the process.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ford mentions that she has many fond memories of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, having played there more than once. She\u2019ll never forget one particularly muddy day back in 2010 when she brought her son inside for a nap and ended up spending a few hours hanging out with Emmylou Harris. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I\u2019m a mom and my income depends on this, when I make an album I have to like, knock it out of the park,\u201d Ford laughs. She admits to perfectionist tendencies, but she also allows herself to goof around at times. \u201cI have this policy where I let myself write cheesy songs too, just because if you believe it has to be great, you\u2019ll never write anything.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

To really get close to her work, Ford knows that she has to forget some of her expectations. \u201cAfter a while,\u201d she says, \u201cyou realize there\u2019s your ego, and there\u2019s your idea of how awesome you think these things are going to be. And of course, underneath all that crap, there\u2019s something that\u2019s actually real.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rachel Narvey Frazey Ford joins me on the phone a week into the new year. When I ask how 2016 is going, she confesses that for the past few days she\u2019s been in bed with a cold. \u201cI\u2019m just coming out of it,\u201d she says. \u201cI feel a bit like a newborn.\u201d Hearing her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}