Christa Couture with Cluny Macpherson
When: Friday, 8 p.m. (doors at 7:30)
Where: Solstice Café, 529 Pandora Ave.
Tickets: $10
Note: Couture also performs today at the Duncan Showroom, 133 Station St., Duncan.
When Christa Couture sits down to write a song, she does so with no shortage of real-life topics at her disposal. But by being autobiographical, the folk singer is committed to laying bare aspects of her personal life — a daunting proposition for the Toronto artist, especially considering hers is one that includes marriage, divorce, childhood deaths and cancer.
Despite the confessional nature of her songs, not everything private is fit for public consumption. Couture admits there is only so much she’s willing to share. “People think I’m a wide-open book, but I’m not,” she said. “There’s tons of stuff that is personal that I don’t put in my music. I still want my music to be a work of art. It’s can’t just be cathartic.”
Her upcoming fourth album, Long Time Leaving, which is due April 15, features considerably less heartbreak than her previous outings, a sign things are turning around for the Edmonton-born performer. Couture’s definition of struggle differs greatly from that of other people, however, so she isn’t planning a celebratory parade just yet: Long Time Leaving features a batch of songs written during a period that saw Couture’s marriage end in divorce.
“It was such a heartache, but it was a normal heartache,” she said. “My earlier albums were talking about some really deep, painful loss. Not that the end of a relationship isn’t a loss, but it is something that everyone goes through. I thought, ‘God, this is so ordinary.’ And that was kind of comforting in a way.”
Couture has endured near-indescribable heartbreak during her 35 years, including a teenage battle with cancer that resulted in her left leg being amputated near the knee. She is a good sport about it — having her prothesis painted with flowers makes it “super fun,” she said with a laugh — but the loss of her leg was nowhere near as difficult as losing her two children, in separate incidents, one a day after childbirth and the other at 14 months.
“People often say: ‘Oh my god, you lost a leg, I can’t imagine. And I say: ‘Ugh, it’s just a leg.’ I’ve lost my children, so what’s a f---ing leg? I’ve got another one.”
The painful and life-altering deaths were written about on The Living Record, her acclaimed 2012 effort, but it was 2008’s The Wedding Singer and the Undertaker, written after the death of her first son, that cut deepest and darkest. Couture made the decision not to relive her past grief on Long Time Leaving, and she’s hoping the solo tour, which brings her to the Duncan Showroom tonight and Victoria’s Solstice Café on Friday, accentuates the positive.
“For me, I wanted to make an album that was musically more upbeat, that might even be fun. I wanted to make an album that wasn’t going to make me cry or wasn’t going to make other people cry. God knows, I love that people come to my shows and cry, it’s a beautiful thing. That has been my work for the last three albums, touching people’s hearts in that way.
“But I kind of need a break, a bit of a reprieve.”
There is a sense of sharing that takes place at Couture’s concerts, on both sides of the audience- performer spectrum. And when her audience heals, so does Couture. “We all get to feel a little less alone for two hours. Grief is a very lonely emotion. A friend of mine called grief a kind of exile, because it can feel that way. It’s so isolating and dark.
“But when people say: ‘I get it,’ that’s such a good feeling. I feel less alone, they feel less alone. That’s where hope comes from.”
mdevlin@timescolonist.com
