Thank you Mary Oliver for your words, passion and love of nature, you will be missed. 

 

Watch Cori fly fishing on the Bow River,

      speaking about writing with Ian Tyson, her new CD, `Four Horses',

      the song group she started to encourage writers and winning the

                                        Mayor's Art's award.

Click the link and enjoy:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcOjvisTVc

 

NEW RELEASE: `Four Horses' is NOW Available...

Itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/artist/cori-brewster/id279060225

        Spotify:    https://open.spotify.com/artist/2JzZLn0kqjfpZwysG8EIXA

Cori Brewster points her musical horses straight into the blizzard and comes out with reveries and resilience on her 5th CD. 

Four Horses, Cori Brewster’s 5th studio project is a roots-alt-country, Canadiana offering. A co-write with Ian Tyson, guest performance by John Wort Hannam and production duties by Canadian roots rocker Leeroy Stagger, this is a stellar outing.

Music industry lingo for a CD with five songs -- is an ‘EP’ or ‘extended play,’ but her own half-joking title is ‘extended pain’ to mark the EP’s undercurrent of loss. It is no secret that Cori has experienced a few difficult years, with the loss of her father as well as the ending of a twenty-year relationship. But Four Horses doesn’t croon; it gallops the tears across the prairies and into deep political and environmental meditations, invoking lost landscapes and lost lives not just to memorialize but to provoke and honour. 

Surprisingly, even though each of the 5 songs chronicles a loss -- the lost lives of Aboriginal youth (Bad Medicine), the loss of a habitat (Let the Wild Horse Run), the death of a father (Canadian Rye) and the loss of love (Western Skyline and Lover’s Kiss) -- the CD is far from sad. Perhaps inspired by her Buddhist practice, Cori put her long-celebrated gift for songwriting to work here in accepting change and finding in it the seeds of new sounds.  She doesn’t avoid the pain.

One might think that the Four Horses in the title and so aptly depicted in the electric original cover art by Janice Tanton is about the horses mentioned in the songs, it is not. Four Horses is a teaching by the Buddha; to grow and change, to forgive and heal through adversary and to see things as they truly are.

With the release of Four Horses, the creative juices of Cori’s difficult year have started flowing and new rivers of creativity have set her on a different course. She’s taking on a new creative non-fiction project, launching her son River into the world on his own, and has fallen in love under the Blue Moon. Winner of the 2015 Mayor’s Spotlight on the Arts Award, Cori is leaving loss behind and riding into happier pastures. 

And now the songs…

The blizzard, in this case, is an actual blizzard. When the opportunity to co-write a song with Canadian icon Ian Tyson arose in the winter of 2013, Brewster didn’t let the scariest snowstorm of the year keep her from driving to Tyson’s ranch outside Longview where the two penned “Western Skyline” together. The song started out as a folk ballad but has since transformed into a feisty, almost rebellious cri de coeur, for standing tall. The chorus proudly accepts the curves of adult life (“My life ain’t no straight line like this Western Skyline”) and this maturity permeates the entire EP.  The encounter with the legendary Tyson, his cowboy wisdom reminding Cori of the father she just lost, sparked Cori’s creative juices, helping her “to get back in the stirrups,” as she says, and write new songs.

Resilience in the face of loss cuts to the heart of Bad Medicine, the most devastatingly beautiful song on the EP. After a visit to the cemetery on the Stoney Nakoda Nation and reading John Reilly’s Bad Medicine which chronicles the myriad injustices committed against the Stoneys (from treaties broken to residential schools to cultural betrayals to corrupt chiefs), Cori wrote Bad Medicine. The Stoney Nakoda Nation, located between the foothills and the Rocky Mountains, are neighbours in the Bow Valley to Banff and Canmore, home to the Brewster family for over 125 years. Cori’s grandfather traded horses with the Stoney and she imagines what her grandfather might feel seeing the devastating effects of colonization, especially in stealing the lives of the young. The haunting drumming and incantation of the names of the dead force us to witness and acknowledge the cycle of abuses stealing aboriginal youth.

“Canadian Rye” will leave everyone in the house with a few tears rolling down their cheeks. It’s a loving testament to Cori’s hard-working cowboy father and Banff personality, Bud Brewster. The song is like Catie Curtis’s ‘Dad’s Yard’ only on wheels and with a cowboy-rhythm. You can smell her dad’s truck and taste the Rye, not that award-winning fancy Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye but the everyday Canadian Rye of a true Albertan.

 “Let the Wild Horses Run.” a musical ghost story, celebrates the endangered wild horses that roam the foothills of the Rockies. Along with artist-wildlife-researcher Maureen Enns, Cori stealthily tracked these majestic animals and captures their mystery in music.

Lovers disappear at the same time as habitats do on Four Horses. The buffalo vanished, the smell of alfalfa is no longer in the air and the lover has left. “Lover’s Kiss” is an elegy to a lost relationship and the most traditional heart-break-folk song on the EP. 

 Katherine Binhammer, Three Sisters News

 

`Buffalo Street’ is a collection of beautiful stories inspired by the rich history of the Canadian Rockies and its people. Cori continues her commitment to the craft of songwriting and attention to detail that so effectively evokes a time, a sense of place, a character and of course a range of emotion.

 I have wanted to be brave enough to post my paintings  on my web site...

                                           Well here they are: click the link and enjoy!

You Tube video: Paintings

     Nature in Focus Hiking: See the Rockies like you never have, and enjoy one of my songs:

                                                     Click here:  You tube video:My Familiar Sky

   

                                      CLICK ON THE LINKS BELOW FOR VIDEO'S