Heart of a Gypsy, Soul of a Dreamer:

On a Caribbean Island, a chance meeting inspired Wakefield's Wendy DeMos to turn her love of music into a career

By Wes Smiderle

(Published in The Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa, Canada)

Wendy DeMos admits she's a gypsy at heart, a trait that becomes obvious once she starts talking about her music.

The conversation remains anchored on two important trips: a year-long sojourn in California, and six months spent in the Caribbean Islands where she met a special someone who inspired her to pursue music in the first place.

The Wakefield-based singer-songwriter traveled to Antigua, a low-lying tropical island in the eastern Caribbean Sea, back in 1993 on a six-month work contract with CUSO (Canadian University Services Overseas).

While walking along the island's many white, sandy beaches, she talked to "the Turtle Girls" (students from the University of Texas who were studying the local colony of Hawksbill turtles). They told her stories about an American artist living nearby named John Francis who had sailed to Antigua after travelling across the continental U.S. on foot.

DeMos was intrigued but didn't make the connection when an American man approached her many days later in an art gallery in a small town on the island's east coast.

The man turned out to be Francis who, besides being a writer and artist, is also a well-known environmental activist and goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Besides walking across the U.S., his methods to raise environmental awareness include abstaining from travel on any motorized vehicle for 22 years and adopting a 17-year vow of silence (which ended shortly before DeMos met him in Antigua).

DeMos had been playing music for years, but it was her meeting and subsequent friendship with Francis that convinced her to "go after it."

"He inspires you to do what you're probably here to do. A loving, kind person," she says.

"He opened my eyes to my own potential."

After living in Antigua, DeMos moved back to Ottawa and plunged into her art by holding creativity workshops. She began performing publicly for the first time and eventually recorded her first album, To Dream Again, released independently in 1996.

DeMos says that first effort told a story of creative awakening, a timid soul venturing out, opening up wider to the outside world and then flourishing.

"That was how I felt at the time because I was finally doing music," she explains.

Now The Great Divide (her second album) is about "the perceived separation that exists among people as they relate to one another. It's about love, loss, joy, sorrow."

The new album boasts an ethereal brand of gentle, soulful folk with a hint of worldbeat provided by the percussion of South African drummer Derek De Beer.

Although the songs had been written over a 10-year period, DeMos recorded the album over nine months last year after a stint traveling and living in California where she hosted her own radio show called "Canadian Connection" showcasing Canadian arists, with a particular focus on Ottawa musicians like Ian Tamblyn, Michaela Foster Marsh and Lynn Miles.

"I called friends and colleagues, interviewed them and plugged their songs," she says.

She also met up with a budding filmmaker named Brandon Blinn who used several of her songs for a short art film called Confidences.

The singer-songwriter likens the eccentric, artistic atmosphere of California to her current home in Wakefield, Que.

"It's not confining," she says. "It's full of artists and interesting characters. That's where I first started performing."

She has no interest in pursuing big record labels and is happy to continue making music and touring at her own pace while maintaining various part-time day-jobs, all of which involve writing.

She plans to tour down the west coast through Canada and the U.S. in March along with Yukon singer Barbara Chamberlin and Oona, a performer from B.C. who plays the Celtic harp.

This weekend she celebrates the release of The Great Divide, a lilting, bittersweet rumination on relationships and their often inevitable conclusions.

"The album focuses more on wishing someone well," she says. "We all have our journeys. Sometimes it means having those journeys together and sometimes not."

Wendy DeMos performs with her band (Danny Artuso, Kurt Walther and Miche Pouliot) and friends Sunday at the Black Sheep Inn, 753 Riverside Dr., Wakefield, Quebec.