The new Maria Dunn album, Hardscrabble Hope, will be the Edmonton social activist and Juno Award-winning folk songwriter’s eighth. It’s a wonderful collection of new songs — a reflection on the past five years — and covers a range of subjects, both harsh and humorous. There are songs about the COVID-19 pandemic, homelessness, social connections, mental health, resilience, gratitude and the ongoing struggle to protect the environment.
Maria is a writer with a critical eye, a keen ear and a nose for sniffing out issues that need to be examined and publicized through the medium of song. For those of you who are not yet familiar with Maria’s recorded output and live performances, I invite you to familiarize yourselves with her amazing body of work.
We begin our conversation by talking about how Maria got started playing music and how her career evolved from there.
“I always loved music and grew up singing and playing with family,” Maria said. “When I got to university, I got involved with CJSR FM 88, our campus community radio station. I dove right in! Within a couple years of volunteering there, I got a folk music show. I went to the Edmonton Folk Fest for the first time in 1986, on the recommendation of friends at CJSR, and I absolutely loved it. Within a year, I was going regularly to the Southside Folk Club. I met Roddy Campbell, Andy Donnelly and Tom Coxsworth, who were all involved with the Celtic Show on CJSR.
In my very early days, it was Spirit of the West that just absolutely fired me up. There was the energy of punk rock and it also took me back to the music that I heard growing up, with the Scottish and Irish songs that my parents would sing any time they had a party. The Robin Hall and Jimmy MacGregor records that I grew up listening to and loving. Then I had a friend who had also been born in the UK. He had gone travelling in his university years and came back with a Pogues record for me as a gift. So that kind of clinched it for me! Also I love the Oyster Band and all that really fired me up as a young person, just seeing this connection between so much of the traditional music I grew up with, but with this punk rock energy. I did my radio show for 13 years, all told, and about three years into it, I started playing music myself for fun. I grew up playing classical piano, although I did play a bit by ear because my dad played by ear. He was one of these people that seemed to be able to accompany anything on the guitar – three chords and the truth and all that.
My parents gave me a guitar for a Christmas present in 1989 and that was it! I learned Eric Bogle’s “Green Fields of France” and Ralph MacTell’s “Streets of London,” and I was also listening to the Proclaimers and the Indigo Girls. I’d listened to so much great music doing that radio program every week, I just started writing songs in that time. Once I graduated, one of my first jobs was back at the university, and I lived across the river downtown and so I had a half hour walk to work. Rain or shine, minus 30 C or plus 25. In those years, I kind of started to listen to the stuff that was happening in my head as I walked and started writing some of my own songs, kind of drawing on all of that input that had gone in over the years. I wrote some terrible songs initially. I am very grateful to my younger brother, Paul, for listening and keeping my secrets and encouraging some of them further to see the light of day. And yeah, that’s how I started writing.”
Having gained a grounding in all sorts of music and a firm footing in the world of folk roots, Maria then began to think about playing live and recording.
“I had already encountered our friend Shannon Johnson, playing music in a few informal folk bands. So, when it came time to make an album, there she was. I never actually thought that I would make my own album first. I was playing in a variety of bands that did a mix of bluegrass and country and Celtic folk music. Bands fell apart, and I found myself feeling that I can’t control the people that I wanted to have a rehearsal with or wanted to do music projects with, I can’t control their commitment. But what I can do is sit at home and write songs.
Then my friend John Armstrong invited me to play the part of Tiny Tim Cratchit in a Christmas Carol project. Then John started a song contest that ran for a few years, and the rules of the song contest were that you had to enter as a solo performer and perform your own songs and accompany yourself. So that kind of gave me permission to not feel like I needed to involve other people and to just go for it with those however many songs. It was three songs a night, and several rounds over the space of six weeks to get to the finals.
Maria’s big break
I didn’t win, of course, but Terry Wickham from the Edmonton Folk Festival heard me and invited me to come and play the festival in the summer of 1997. So that really was a beautiful affirmation that Terry gave me, and I’m very grateful for that. That started me on this path of me being the one writing the songs and then involving people that I love working with, like Shannon and her brothers, Jeremiah and Solan McDade. And yeah, we’ve just been on this amazing adventure ever since, and now we’re at album number eight, and I’ve continued writing songs and Shannon has continued being a wonderful producer!”
I ask what it was in particular that made Maria gravitate towards Shannon as her producer and musical accomplice.
“She always is serving the song,” she replied. “I think that’s what I always loved about playing music live with her too. Being the amazing technical and musical player that she is, I still always felt like she was listening to the song and thinking, ‘How can I serve the song as I’m playing with it?’ You know? After playing in many folk bands for fun, where some people were just out to noodle from beginning to end as much as they could, this was such a beautiful and refreshing thing.”
I am curious to find out how it feels to look back over the body of work that she has created and what emotions are connected with completing eight albums of original material.
“That’s a really good question,” Maria said. “You seldom slow down and stop and think about that. Especially talking to you one week before the big CD album launch concert and the new album coming out. Tom Coxworth asked me a few weeks ago, ‘Do you feel that your songs make a difference in the world?’ I love Billy Bragg, and he gave a keynote talk at Folk Alliance almost 10 years ago now. I loved what he said: songs don’t change the world, but songs can change people’s hearts. They can maybe access people’s ability to listen and hear something in a different way that can change their heart. Then it will be people who change the world. So, I am still doing my best to put that message out and hopefully to make a difference in that way.
I’m pretty rooted in my community here in Edmonton in terms of being involved with the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, with trying to be involved in these different movements that I sing about as well. Yeah, what have I accomplished? Every time I do my tax return, it looks like I’ve accomplished nothing! But I think many of us know how rich life is when you are connected with your community and with people that are doing things that you care about, as well as the people that you meet through music.
Two nights ago, I sang ‘Take it Easy on Me,’ one of my older songs. I still sing that pretty much at every concert that I do because it still really resonates with people. When someone comes up to me who’s never heard me before and tells me that a song like that really moved them, then I am affirmed that I’m doing my job.
You know, when I look at my parents’ generation they were very committed spiritually, very culturally Catholic, but also raised with very much a sense that living their faith was important. And I don’t belong to the Catholic Church anymore for so many reasons of its corruption and the sexual abuse and the cover ups and everything. But that word vocation comes to me, which is why I’m talking about that history. That’s how I was raised, that whatever you are given in this life, whatever advantages, whatever gifts, then you are thinking about how can you use that in service to the common good. The idea of vocation and of whatever it is you do, whether it’s computer programming or acting or writing songs or being a labourer, being a writer — whatever it is that you do, that you try and focus what it is you’re doing with that sense of a greater purpose. So that’s where I come from.”
I respond by saying that it all makes sense to me. I think it’s an incredible achievement to consistently be focused on writing original material with meaningful content. It’s not easy to do and to accumulate so many songs and to achieve that level of quality is something to be proud of. Which gets us nicely around to Maria’s new album, Hardscrabble Hope. I observe that, even in writing material that tackles big and often difficult issues, she seems to have this knack of still being optimistic and hopeful. I want to discover where that comes from and how she incorporates it into her writing.
Where hope comes from
“I’m so grateful for the upbringing I was given as well as the people that I know now in my life,” she said. “That’s what gives me hope, and when the listeners come and tell me that a song was meaningful and has given them hope too. There is this feedback, you know, there is this exchange, right? So when I’m feeling down, when I’m feeling without hope, there very often is someone in my life who extends to me something hopeful. When I’m invited to do something that feeds my well of good spirit then it reminds me of how many beautiful and good people there are in the world.
“So when I am getting angry at the huge meat packing conglomerates that refused to properly protect their workers during the pandemic,” she continued, referring to the song “Essential’ from Hardscrabble Hope, “I feel like that’s one of the angriest songs I’ve written, but it comes back to trying to frame things in a way that that gives people room to say I can do something about this. That’s why I put Maude Barlow’s “Hope is a moral imperative” quote on the album notes because I feel that when you stop hoping, then what is your motivation to act? So as long as we’re continuing to hope, that for me is fueling me to ask, ‘What am I doing to try and further this situation in a hopeful way?’
“When I put a song out there that has a strong story to it or some history to it, I often will have three people or more coming up to me saying, ‘Oh, that reminds me of my grandmother’s experience’ or ‘I have had this experience.’
“There are no shortages of beautiful things to write about and of important human things to write about. People affirm for me that telling this part of history or telling this story of these workers is important, because it makes them value their own experience or their parents’ experience. That feeds me. So that’s why I keep trying to put a hopeful tinge on things. I mean, occasionally I do think, oh man, that’s a lot of heavy stuff. I’d better try and make this one at least sound cheerful. So there’s that whole trick of trying to make something sound upbeat, even though it can have some very serious lyrics.
“You and I both know some amazing folk musicians, and I think of the dearly departed Vin Garbutt, who sang some really difficult songs but was so hilarious in between that you felt great after seeing an evening of his performance. Even though you had listened to some really important and really intense and sometimes tremendously sad songs, you were laughing your guts out in between and so he found a magical way of balancing, by knowing that a live audience coming to see you, who are willing to listen to these difficult songs, who are willing to think about these important human concerns, you still need to give them something positive, you need to give them hope, you need give them some fun. It’s worth saying that people continue to hope. They continue to take action and they continue to stand in solidarity with each other.”
Like all of Maria’s recordings, Hardscrabble Hope contains a variety of musical styles and flavours including country, bluegrass, Celtic, blues, old-time and jazz. I ask her if that’s something she deliberately looks to incorporate into her albums.
“I have stretched in different directions depending on the project,” she said.
“For me, it’s very much driven by what is the song about. Shannon and I were kind of laughing about how a few songs on this album, like ‘Walking the Miles’ or ‘Reach Out,’ were kind of a little more at the folk-pop end of things. Which would be a little bit of homage to my love of Indigo Girls and The Proclaimers right?
With ‘Coal is a Thirsty Business,’ for instance, I initially wrote it kind of as a straight up kind of country waltz, because I was thinking of the area of Alberta that I’m talking about in the song. I thought, ‘This is a country song.’ Then Shannon complained that I already had too many three chord country waltzes on the album, there was no way that she was going to another country waltz on the album. So, I said … ‘Yeah, this sounds a little similar to something else I’ve written. What else can I do here?’ And I had thought of that old trick of just taking something from a major key to a minor key and see where it takes you differently with the melody. So, I did that, and I changed the progression of the chords, and then all of a sudden it had a different feel. I had so much fun singing that song once I rewrote it. I was doing a four-day tour down in southern Alberta in that region where they’re going through the big struggle protesting against coal mining in the Rockies.
What’s next?
“We didn’t have an arrangement for live performance, and Shannon and Jeremiah were coming with me on this tour. I said, ‘I have to sing this song.’ We are going to be singing for the people that are going through this. I really want them to hear this. And so, we worked it up pretty quickly for live performance, and then we kind of went back and did a few different things for the recording. I was determined that song had to go on this album. This is happening now, and I really want to say something about it, and I really want to give some encouragement to those people who are fighting that fight right now.”
At the time this interview took place, Maria’s main focus was on the Nov. 6 album launch concert for Hardscrabble Hope, which she was very much looking forward to.
But before we leave the FaceTime session, I ask her to tell me about any plans she has for the next stage of her musical journey.
“What’s next? Number one, sleep!” she said. “Number two, doing more of my own touring, playing concerts of my own songs. Number three, I hope to be back in B.C. in the next couple of years touring our ‘On The River’ video ballad (with Cree-Dene singers and songwriters Debbie Houle and Sherryl Sewepagaham), inspired by the life and legacy of Chief Dorothy McDonald-Hyde of the Fort McKay First Nation, which is 60 kilometres downstream from all the industry in Fort McMurray, AB. That is a show melding music, video interviews with the community and video footage that we showcased recently at Pacific Contact in Vancouver.
“I have existing video ballads that I’m hoping to do some Edmonton presentations with in June of 2026. It is the 40th anniversary of one of our biggest labour struggles here in Alberta around meat packing workers. And we have this show called Packingtown, so we will definitely be presenting that show in Edmonton and Calgary in that period around that time.
I’ve collaborated on four different video ballads that I would love to get into a theatre here in Edmonton and just have them in repertory, like for four nights. There’s Troublemakers: Working Albertans; GWG: Piece by Piece; On the River and Packingtown – all musical multimedia pieces. There’s a recording on YouTube of GWG: Piece by Piece but the rest of them only exist as live shows.
“As much as I do love playing in front of a live audience, I also value being able to slow down and being able to have a more relaxed time – working on your voice, working on your instruments, a more relaxed schedule that way.
It was one of the hardest lessons I had to learn when I started doing this full time is that the business part of it will always be endless. So, you have to take care and make sure that you carve out this time still for the joy of making music, the joy of listening to music, the joy of creating music.
“I would like to do as much touring as I can while I’m still healthy and while I still have lots to sing and play. I’m going to try and continue writing. So yeah, there’s no big specific foreseeing of anything, but I’m just, I’m very grateful for being able to do what I am doing, what I have done and I would love to continue doing it.”
I’m sure I speak for all of us fans of her music when I say that we are very grateful for being able to witness what Maria Dunn is doing in songwriting, in multi-media, in concert performances, in writing and in social activism. Long may it continue!
