Americana north of the border: Winnipeg duo, The Small Glories, spring to the Discovery Theatre stage March 25

All musical genres are good — some I love more than others — but what’s most important for me is hearing something that opens my heart just a little more than it was before.

So it was when I pulled up my music app, typed in Small Glories, and pushed play. Cara Luft & JD Edwards’ vocals pierced through the exhaustion of my day. I was awakened by Cara’s openness and honesty.

“I’m so glad you led with that”, she said when I called her for this interview Monday afternoon, ahead of the band’s March 25 Anchorage Concert Association show at the Performing Arts Center. I had just described how her and JD’s vocals intertwine like two hawks flying up above, weaving in and out of each other as if beckoning me to stand strong with my male counterparts in this world.

“I’m the boss; I’m the bandleader. Small Glories is my baby,” Luft said. “It was really important for me as a woman not to lose myself in a project.”

Cara started this project as she was turning 40, the “era when women start to become invisible, unfortunately,” she said. So it was crucial for her to not fade into the background. Luft had been in a project before The Small Glories with the trio, the Wailin’ Jennys, where she felt she had gotten lost in the mix. She would not let that happen again.

“This is a project where I’m not going to get lost; JD’s not gonna lost either and we’re gonna be unified friends,” Luft said. “The way that our voices blend is going to be a big part of how we don’t get lost, as is the way we present ourselves on stage. We angle in and look at each other, so as to not muscle the other person out.”

This project was all about standing strong with one another. It’s also the band’s first flying tour since the pandemic.

“There use to be, ‘I’ll see you next year,’” as the band made its yearly return to venues across the world, Cara said. Her sense of community is clear. She cannot wait to connect and get back to all the people that are involved with a concert, from the sound person, workers at the venue, other musicians, the audience, and on and on.

Cara is excited to get on the road again and share their latest album “Assinibone and the Red” (which came out in 2019), songs from their previous album, and some new songs not recorded yet.

In Long Long Moon, off this album, the listener is invited to cry their way out of their pandemic cave.

The sound of the banjo on this song brings a vision of fingers on a mystical hand beckoning us to come to see them perform live.

Small Glories has been together for almost eight years. It all started with a chance meeting — or maybe divine connection — where Cara described that they were partnered together by a “mad artistic director” at an anniversary show at Winnipeg’s venerable West End Cultural Centre.

We laughed when talking about the sound of the Small Glories music, how people love to try to wrap things up in a simple one-word package. But Cara and JD’s sounds are a mix of anything but simple.

Cara told me how they both grew up in musical families and sang in church.

“Maybe the hymns were where we learned to sing harmonies,” she said. Cara’s parents toured as a folk duo and she told of musicians filling her house throughout her childhood. Her parents were big fans of legends like Pete Seeger, who not only influenced her musically, but also moved her to social activism, which resonates in the track ‘Sing’ off the latest album. JD also came from a musical family, but more the classical realm. JD’s path was the trombone, jazz and rock and soul and funk. Small Glories mixes folk, rock and soul melded into bluegrass and the “Canadian heartland sound,” as Cara calls it, that we might call Americana south of the Canadian border. Cara went on to say that whenever people ask them, “What kind of music do you play?” JD says simply — “It’s good music.”

Cara and JD are not from Winnipeg, but it is where they call home. She went on to describe her adopted city as a place not surrounded by the beauty of the mountains like Alberta but by the beauty of extremities creating the environment — the brutal weather of -40 in winter and super hot +35 in the summer. These factors along with the beautiful stories of the people who call it home — the huge indigenous population, French, Ukrainians, Métis, Jewish, English, and more make for the art that is created there. Cara and JD sing offer an homage in their song, “Winnipeg”, a love song for their adopted home. As our conversation came to a close, all I wanted to do was call a babysitter, get online, and buy tickets to the gig. My soul has been aching for live music in the last two years and now I was assured that not only would we all hear amazing music on March 25th but that we would be pulled into the arms of Cara and JD’d to listen to their magical storytelling and feel overjoyed that we had left the comfort of our homes after the last two years.

Oskar Saville is the former lead Singer of 10,000 Maniacs from 2002 to 2007. She is a writer, podcaster of; Conversations with Oskar, and a Spiritual life Coach and Energy healer. She lives in New York City with her 3 awesome kids.