Lisa MacIsaac and Brenley MacIsaac.
-by John Gillis
“Songwriting for us is about both art and preserving memories. Hopefully, in the process of writing, we find solid ground, some semblance of a quiet mind, and a place to heal.” – Madison Violet
Brenley MacEachern and Lisa MacIsaac of Madison Violet are a duo with strong Inverness County roots on Route 19.
Lisa is the sister of Ashley MacIsaac and Brenley, though she grew up in Ontario, is a granddaughter of Christy MacEachern (Christy’s Look Off in Creignish). The pair never met until they were adults despite both having family ties in Creignish.
It’s hard to believe but Madison Violet has been touring and recording steadily for some 17 years now.
“Our latest recording, The Knight Sessions, was just released earlier this month across North America and it was released late last year in Europe to coincide with our last big tour over there,” MacIsaac told The Oran by phone from Prince Edward Island where the duo was set to play a small café later that evening.
Madison Violet has seven full-length albums under their belt and this recording sees the song “We Are Famous” as the first single and video release.
The song references life on the road as a touring musician with the video shot and directed by Brenley.
The song has a story to it as well. While they were rehearsing the song in a hotel room somewhere in Europe they found out that the singer Sam Smith was waiting and listening outside their door, impressed by what he was hearing inside. It’s time like that, the duo says, that give you a boost to keep on with your music.
Despite the video and poking fun at life on the road, Lisa MacIsaac says she and Brenley love touring. They tour because they want to.
“Lisa and Brenley are no strangers to tragedy, but finding a way to move through the dark to find a glimmer of light, has become a speciality of theirs. It seemed that bad luck had followed them around for nearly a decade. Brenley’s brother murdered in Toronto. Lisa’s brother killed in a car accident. Cancelled tours due to death and illness, and heartbreak. So they cleaned slate and took control of their life and career, and that is how The Knight Sessions came to be,” their publicists have noted.
There have been other developments over their career. Where once they were a couple, that relationship ended some eight or so years ago. Still, there was never a doubt that they wanted to continue to play music together.
“Music has also always been a sort of therapy for us, helping us through the difficult times. We write about those times and share our stories. You have to get back in the saddle and not wallow in it for too long. We memorialize those people we’ve lost and it helps us get through those low points,” Lisa added.
MacIsaac shares a story about another cut off the new record called “How We See Love”.
“Brenley and I are always pretty candid on stage about who we are and the morning after we sang that song at one of our shows in a small town in Germany we were approached on the street by a man who told us that his daughter had just come out to him and he hadn’t responded to it very well. You could just see the emotion in his eyes when he told us that this song had helped him to understand that everything was going to be alright and he was going to apologize to his daughter,” said MacIsaac.
Five songs on The Knight Sessions were taken from Madison Violet’s previous European release called Year of the Horse, a full-on dance, electronic pop album. MacIsaac said Madison Violet felt the stories in the songs were getting a bit lost in the production so they decided to re-record some of them for The Knight Sessions in addition to other songs.
In addition to a mini-tour of the Maritimes this month, Madison Violet is touring Ontario later this summer and expects to travel to Germany and Australia and Switzerland in the fall before returning to the East Coast around Christmas time to perform material from their Christmas album that was released last year.
“We’re working to finish up the writing for our next recording slated for 2018 and down the road we’d like to mark 2019 with a 20th anniversary tour and the release of a songbook which our fans have been asking for,” MacIsaac concluded.
Since their fateful meeting in 1999, Madison Violet has been nominated for numerous ECMA awards and a Juno award, won a Canadian Folk Award for Vocal Group of the Year, the Maxell John Lennon Songwriting grand prize, and many more. They have released seven studio albums, as well as a live CD and DVD recorded in Köln, during one of their many European tours.
