The crowd was packed in tighter than a rush-hour OC Transpo bus for Catriona Sturton’s performance at the Raw Sugar Café on Jan. 10.
Armed with a guitar, a porchboard base drum, and a harmonica stand called “Beast,” Sturton regaled the crowd with a variety of blues songs.
She began her set with an ode to butt-dialing.
“Speed dial, it’s been a while but this ain’t romance . . . No, I’m just calling from my pants,” she sang.
Sturton said humour is an important component in her song writing because it reflects her own personality.
“This isn’t joke rock, this is a serious love song,” she insisted before singing about poutine.
Sturton rocked the stage with a sometimes funny and sometimes mournful blues sound.
“I kind of felt like maybe it was ‘twee blues’ but I also kind of felt like that’s one of the more terrible genre names you could imagine,” she said with a laugh.
Her new album’s title, Bumble Bee, comes from a sweater that Sturton’s friend gave her.
“It was really this adorable sweater. It had little bees on it that I thought she had bought, but as it turns out, her mom had embroidered the bees because they had gotten some holes in the sweater,” she said.
The patched-up sweater became a symbol for her approach to music.
“I thought it was such a great metaphor for taking something that was maybe kind of starting to fray and fall apart and return it to a state that was better than the original,” she said. “It’s the same thing in writing songs or making art. You’re taking something that is material, or life, and trying to make something sweeter out of it.”
Sturton pulls influences from a variety of musical experiences, from her indie rock past, to her blues harmonica training and travels to Japan.
“I lived in Japan and I got to play this instrument called Shamisen,” she said. “The instrument has a lot of drones to it, so the tuning I started using comes from having these open notes. It took me quite a few years to put all these influences together.”
Her album was built around her harmonica playing, an instrument she also teaches in her spare time.
“I started to figure out a way to play harmonica . . . on a microphone stand where I could play guitar at the same time,” she said. “Once I figured that out, I was like ‘Oh my gosh, maybe I can do this.’”
She said she gets a “big thrill,” teaching women how to play because harmonica is a traditionally male-dominated instrument. Her harmonica teacher and mentor in Indiana first gave her the nickname “Beast,” she said, after NFL player Marshawn Lynch “who’s ferocious and silent and eats a lot of Skittles.”
“At first, it was kind of like a joke nickname but lately I feel like more of a beast when I play harmonica so I feel like I grew into that name,” she said.
Oshawa musician Kaitlyn Zarzour opened the night with a collection of softer country songs.
Zarzour, who is in the process of recording her first album, said the performance was a return to the Canadian stage after two months spent living with musicians and writing in Nashville.
“I was just vibing off of everyone and I was getting a lot of positive energy,” she said. “I was feeling really good up there.”
Sturton herself will be heading to Nashville later this year, and touring Italy in September. The 38-year-old Ottawa based singer-songwriter said she’s been thinking about releasing an album since her early 20s, but it’s only been for the last two years that she decided to try playing professionally.
“I had secret dreams as a kid of being a singer but I was shy so that made it harder to sing,” she said.
Raw Sugar owner Nadia Kharyati said she’s seen Sturton evolve onstage.
“There’s something about Catriona that’s electric. She can captivate a room, a whole room,” she said.
