When her brother committed suicide in 2012 Edmonton musician Cayley Thomas started writing songs to cope with the tragedy.
Her resulting five track EP ‘Ash Mountain’ caught on with a lot of people. She gets a lot of play on CKUA and got slots at the Edmonton and Canmore Folk festivals last summer where she got to play tweeners on the main stage between Feist and Charles Bradley.
“It‘s nice of them to spin this. It’s sort of hard to do when it’s your first hack at it. So the fact they are playing me is pretty humbling,” she said.
She will be playing the Owl Acoustic Lounge, Jan, 24 with the Palmers — Evan Uschenko and Emma Austin’s new rock and roll band, who will be playing their first gig.
She is friends with Emma Austin, who is Evan Uschenko’s girlfriend, who she knew from playing with Michael Rault, who she went to school with.
“I’ve been singing since I was young, but it was always other people’s songs,” Thomas said, who had just graduated from the University of Alberta with a BFA in acting.
“ This great opportunity came up to play the Edmonton and Canmore Folk Festivals so I seized it. But when you play big festivals like this, it is nice to have something to sell,” she said.
So she grabbed the guitarist and bassist / audio engineer from her ’60s Soul revival band a d entered the SOund Extractor Studio in Edmonton.
“ We took eight hours a song, which is pretty concise,” she said.
She had turned to music to cope with the suicide of her brother who was an avid snowboarder who was living in Banff.
“I started writing songs to cope. it was hard on all of us. People loved him. But depression is a disease and so is addiction. so about 50 of us went to Banff and climbed a mountain and spread his ashes there,” she said adding she hadn’t written any songs at all before.
“So Ash Mountain is actually Lake Louise,” she said.
She is excited to bring her band to Lethbridge. She plays all over Edmonton in various incarnations — sometimes solo, or with a drummer or a stand up bassist. She often plays clubs like the Artery as well as a lot of house concerts.
“I’ll be playing the Ep and a lot of other songs I know,” she said.
“I’m going to Indonesia in 12 days, so this will be the last hurrah with the band. I’m just going to take a travel guitar and see some of the world and start writing songs,” she said. She hopes to record a full length album when she returns and do a cross Canadian tour.
There is no cover for the show at the Owl Acoustic Lounge which begins at 9 p.m., Jan. 24.
