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Though the body has ventured across the land, the soul has never strayed far from her childhood homestead. Ali McCormick offers up her most personal offering to date with That Place You Know, her third album.
A true wilderness wordsmith, Ali populates her music with colourful characters you enjoy spending time with. Though you’ll find struggle and bittersweet kisses, McCormick usually gives you a clearing at the end of the path where you can dip your line into the local fishing hole and dream away the afternoon. Rooted in folk, songs like “Tackle Box, Saw, Chain and a Knife” and “The Woodstove” show the road at the end of a long tour now leads to her own cozy clearing on an island sheep farm. A need to be inside nature’s envelope is part of her DNA.
“If I learned anything during my years working in bakeries and restaurants it is that some recipes call for familiarity.” she says. “Nature has the perfect ingredients for an environmentally-inspired songwriter to cook up some good, wholesome poetry.”
Cook she does! That Place You Know, like 2014’s self-titled recording and 2016’s Clean Water, is full of tasty, road-tested songs. Brimming with youthful hijinks and wild days at the midway, there are also cherished moments spent at home in the warm caress of love. One would expect no less from The Lioness of Lanark County.
Once, long before they called her The Lioness, Ali McCormick was growing up off-the-grid. Her family grew vegetables and tended livestock on a subsistence farm high on a Watson’s Corners hill. It was a rugged life and there was hardship but there were also spring melts, maple syrup runs and sunlit days spent chasing deer out of the garden with an old hound dog. For Ali, there was the guitar too.