Tickets: $73.50 from the Royal McPherson box office or rmts.bc.caThe world of music moves at a rapid rate these days — so quickly, in fact, that a five-year break between albums resulted in a wave of “what-the-hell-took-you-so-long?” queries for Jeremy Dutcher.
Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa also took five years to complete. However, the composer, activist and member of the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick was relatively unknown at the time, so the length of time it took Ducther to complete the album was not a storyline in the press. It wouldn’t have mattered to him even if it were.
“It was not a light choice to make the flip into English, but it’s one that I hope will be able to propel our perspective and our story, even though it’s not in our language, to another audience. In anybody’s line of work they have to deal with second-guessing. I thought about this album as a personal excavation. With the first record, it was very much a community-oriented project. I was doing that work very much for my Wolastoqiyik people. This one is for me. English is part of my journey, too.