Episode 22: The Small Glories

  We are joined by Cara Luft and JD Edwards, who make up the Canadian duo The Small Glories.  Recently named artist of the year by the International Folk Alliance, as well as Vocal Group of the Year at the Juno Awards, (where their recent album Assiniboine and the Red garnered Contemporary Album of the Year), The Small Glories are a product of both JD and Cara’s individual veteran singer/songwriter talents as well as the dynamic creative combination they become together. They offer great insights into why their particular vocal talents works so wonderfully together, the various ways their different songs come together, and what they feel is important in their wholly engaging, entertaining, and energetic live performances.

Roots powerhouse duo The Small Glories are Cara Luft & JD Edwards, a musical tour-de-force partnership planted on the Canadian Prairies. Thrown together purely by accident for an anniversary show at Winnipeg’s venerable West End Cultural Centre, The Small Glories could almost make you believe in fate. With a stage banter striking a unique balance between slapstick and sermon, these veteran singer-songwriters have a way of making time disappear, rooms shrink, and audiences feel as they are right there on the stage with the band — writing the songs, living the songs, performing the songs. It’s not uncommon for listeners to find themselves laughing, dancing, crying, or caught up in a good ol’ fashioned sing-along. “We’re folk singers, we try to write stuff that people can relate to,” says Edwards, whose looming stage presence and penetrating eyes find him the yin to Luft’s petite, snort-laughing yang. The material of a Small Glories concert is welcoming in terms of subject, folk-pop melody and instrumentation — songs of love, loss, and environment, delivered with soaring, interwoven vocals on various combinations of stomping clawhammer banjo, guitar and harmonica. However, a Small Glories performance is really about what happens in-between the songs. “The feedback we get from a lot of audiences is that it’s not just about the music for them,” Luft says. “It’s the whole package.”