Canada has given us some great musicians, including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Rush and now Kendel Carson.

Classically trained and once a violinist with the National Youth Orchestra and a featured soloist with the Victoria Symphony, her passion lies in her roots of country, folk and rock music. She played around Victoria, and one fateful night talked her way onto the stage to play with Spirit, which led to her inclusion in the Celtic-Latin folk-rock band The Paperboys.

While playing at a festival with them, she met Chip Taylor, the man who wrote “Wild Thing” and “Angel of the Morning.” Taylor befriended her and after several weeks of discussions regarding the direction of her career, she went to New York to do some demos with him. Neither had any expectations, but ended up recording an entire album within a few days. That album “Rearview Mirror Tears” yielded the hit “I Like Trucks,” which established Carson as an artist on both sides of the Atlantic.

After a highly successful tour of Europe and the US, Carson went into a studio built in an old barn near Woodstock NY with Taylor at the helm, providing not only mentoring, but songs that Carson made her own. Enlisting the musical talents of John Platania (Van Morrison), Bryan Owings (Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller), Ron Eoff (The Band, Delbert McClinton), and Tony Leone (Levon Helm, Ollabelle), she recorded “Alright Dynamite,” her sophomore effort that is currently burning up the Americana charts.

Songs like “Cowboy Boots,” “Jesse James,” and “One Blue Dress On The Line” show a singer and songwriter who’s lyrical imagery remain rooted in country, but the sultry “Belt Buckle” and “Oh Baby Lie Down” show a much more diverse expansion of her style. The epic “Seven Shadows On My Golden Roses” was described to me by Taylor as “an important song ... I don’t know why, but it’s important.” And that it is, signalling that this is only the beginning of a wildly diverse and amazing career.

I had the pleasure of seeing Carson perform in Nashville, and her diminutive stature belies the power of her voice and her amazing prowess on the fiddle. “Alright Dynamite” is an album that solidly establishes Kendel Carson as a great talent, of whom we can expect more great things in the future.

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