What: An Evening with Fred Penner
When: Sunday, 5:30 p.m. (doors at 5)
Where: Alix Goolden Performance Hall, 907 Pandora Ave.
Tickets: $17.50 at Lyle’s Place and ticketfly.com
Fred Penner has been playing music professionally for 43 years. And yet, after all his past successes — from a 12-year run hosting Fred Penner’s Place on CBC Television to being named a Member of the Order of Canada and Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal recipient — Penner considers 2015 one of his best years yet.
“Delighted is an understatement,” Penner said Wednesday from his home in Winnipeg.
“I love what I’ve been allowed to do.”
His current album, Where in the World, won him both the Juno Award and the Western Canadian Music Award in the children’s category this year. In September, Penner was asked to host the hipster-leaning Polaris Music Prize gala in Toronto, one that featured a performance by the Taylor Swift- and Adele-approved Tobias Jesso Jr.
“All the pieces in life kind of fell into place. Creatively, it’s been a fabulous journey. It’s constantly fulfilling.”
The capper to Penner’s fine run comes on Dec. 19, when the family entertainer performs — for the first time, surprisingly — at the Burton Cummings Theatre in Winnipeg, one of the top concert venues in the country.
Penner is clearly chuffed at the state of his resurgence, but acknowledges that professional musicians are often subject to peaks and valleys. He has navigated both thus far with a reasonable outlook on life.
“Every year is a banner year, because I’m doing what I love to do,” Penner said. “I’m living the dream. I know it’s a bit of a trite phrase, perhaps, but I absolutely am living a career that is certainly enviable. I’ve never done anything other than performing as my livelihood since 1972.”
Penner, who performs Sunday in Victoria at the Alix Goolden Performance Hall, recently discovered a new way to navigate the stress of such a demanding schedule.
“I’m starting days with a ‘sit.’ I go into my sun room and find a comfortable spot, and start breathing and focusing. I let the world and my thoughts come to me and flow through. After 15 minutes or half an hour, it’s very much a calming and centring position that balances the insanity that is around me.”
His partner of four years, Rae Ellen Bodie, is a Buddhist. After developing “an internal understanding of what that is,” Penner recently took up the practice.
It has helped him balance the details of touring and the stress of the world at large, ensuring that he looks at things from a glass-half-full perspective.
“We’re at a very challenging time of life. But there’s a lovely balance to that. With Syrian refugees, of which a lot of people are critical, people with open arms are saying they will help them find their way. No matter what culture you’re coming from, we are essentially all in this together.”
His specialty is penning musical variations of the same theme. His biggest hits (The Cat Came Back and Sandwiches) have kept him in good stead with audiences, in part due to their timeless nature. Penner fans are both the young and the young at heart.
He credits his current wave of popularity to a reinvention of sorts.
He overhauled the way he was connecting with audiences in 2008, and began performing for older fans in bars. That opened the door for an ongoing schedule of speaking engagements at universities and elsewhere, between afternoon concerts for children.
What he discovered along the way was that the children he entertained in the 1980s were still fans years later.
Plenty even had kids of their own, Penner said.
“I’m a dad and I’m coming to this table from an adult perspective, with the understanding of what it is to be a parent.
“I’ve shied away from being called a ‘children’s entertainer.’ I prefer ‘family entertainer’ because what I hope I’m relating to is something that is universal, something that parents can relate to as strongly as children do.”