61 f Mama’s On The Road
Nova Scotia duo Mama’s Broke make music that’s weather-beaten, minimalist but joyful too. Cara Gibney hears about their journey(s).
be moving in some way.” So say Nova Scotia acoustic-folk duo, Mama’s Broke. “It is one of the most artful expressions you can experience from a group of peo- ple, time, or place,” they continue.“We believe this language of art and music is one of the best ways to understand each other.”
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Mama’s Broke consists of Lisa Maria and Amy Lou. Two musicians whose Cana- dian roots are threaded through their music, but whose music also innately mixes genres and styles ranging from Quebecois to Balkan, Celtic to punk, metal to old- time to blues. There is a joyful inclusion of foot percussion and traditional dance in their performance, buoyed by banjo, man- dolin, fiddle and guitar. Their songs are weather-beaten by dark realities and grey areas. The human condition.
raditional music always tends to sound badass... so much time and care has been put into it, there’s no way it won’t
It all began in transit. The pair met in early 2014 when Amy Lou gave Lisa Maria a lift from Montreal to Halifax. They hit it off almost immediately. “During that car ride, we had a lot of time to discuss our similar influences and shared desire to use music as a method of expression. Although the band name did not come until some weeks later, it was very much ‘Mama’s Broke’ from the start.” They hit the ground running and within months they had released their first record, a self-titled six-track EP of fiddle and banjo-based tunes and songs. Mostly self- penned, the EP initiates the signature sprawl of Mama’s Broke; from blues to Celtic to folk and beyond. Bringing us through seasons, through moods, from scrubland bleak to foot-paced cordial uplift, it’s all there in six tracks. Since then they’ve toured Europe and North America, released their debut album, Count The Wicked, won the Canadian Folk Music Award for Ensemble Of The Year, and they were recently nominated for an East Coast Music Award for the 2018 Rising Star Recording Of The Year.
o be fair though, these apples don’t seem to have fallen too far from the tree. The early days of Amy Lou and Lisa Maria seem to have made their musi- cal careers a pretty natural choice. Amy Lou’s father is a guitarist: “He raised us to be very particular and discerning about music. He also encouraged us to play music and sing harmonies together from a very young age.” Indeed, she did sing a lot as a child, but just to herself. “I mostly read books and planned on the day that I was going to get out of Wallace, Nova Scotia and become a journalist or a lawyer or something like that.”
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However, Amy Lou began honing alternative skills that would ultimately bring her out into the world. Nowadays she is a multi-instrumentalist, playing banjo, guitar and mandolin, all of which were self-taught. She had an “an angsty indie band in high school, like everyone else,” and on leaving school the first thing she did was travel. (“We made it as far as
Photo: Katy Hopkins
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