The next chapter

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This article was published 11/12/2010 (5406 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So who is Angela Kelman?

The member of the Canadian country trio Farmer’s Daughter which won national awards?

The mother? The author? The lounge singer? The music teacher? The awards show host? The leader of a 10-piece R&B band?

The star of her own TV show? (OK, that one hasn’t happened. Yet.)

While the resumé may appear random, if you look closely you can see where one thing has led to another and an odd creative symmetry exists.

It’s even geographic.

The Brandon native has also lived in Winnipeg, Los Angeles and her present home in North Vancouver. The lines race back and forth between the cities.

She spent nearly a decade singing in Winnipeg lounges between 1982-89. She lived in L.A. from 1989-91.

She then moved to Vancouver because many of her friends from Winnipeg went there. It was in Vancouver that she joined Farmer’s Daughter, after getting some sage advice from back home in Brandon.

And her two recently produced children’s books also have a Brandon angle that led back to the West Coast.

The Crocus Plains graduate is best known for her decade-long spell with Farmer’s Daughter, a country trio that also included Saskatchewan’s Jake Leiske and Alberta’s Shauna Rae Samogard.

In 1992, Leiske and Samogard had been auditioning to find a third member and thought they had found her. When that woman couldn’t commit to touring, a mutual friend introduced them to Kelman, who had moved to Vancouver a year earlier. Kelman’s audition was a huge success but she couldn’t decide whether to join the band.

Naturally she called called her mom Molly in Brandon for some advice.

"I said ‘Mom, what do I do?’ and she said ‘Well honey, you’ve been floating your boat a long time so maybe it’s time to work with somebody else and take the pressure off yourself.’ That was good advice because it was a really good run. As much heartache as there was, there was joy and fun."

The women released three studio albums — "Girls Will Be Girls" in 1993, "Makin’ Hay" in 1996 and "This Is The Life" in 1998 — placing 13 songs in the Canadian country top 40 charts and hitting No. 1 in 1996 with "Cornfields or Cadillacs."

The biggest show they ever played was on Parliament Hill on Canada Day in front of more than 50,000 people.

They also played in Tiger Lily, Alta., population seven. (The show actually drew more than 300 people because it attracted fans from throughout the district.) Military tours took them to Canadian posts around the world.

In 1997 they received a Canadian Country Music Award as Canada’s top group. In 1998, they won a Juno as best country group.

But being a star in Canada isn’t easy. You can top the singles charts without selling many albums, which means you’re on the road to make money.

And that’s when you’re competing with the powerhouses from south of the border.

"The Canadian system is very difficult," she says. "We’re one-tenth of the size of the U.S. When you look at what we were up against and what we did … I was living on a pittance at the height of Farmer’s Daughter because all the money that we made went back into making the videos, recording the CDs. We had some investors but there was a lot of money generated by us that went directly back into the career. You get tired of working hard and making no money. We had to deal with the Dixie Chicks being an international success. They had a record company that with their first album put $1.5 million just into marketing. You can’t afford to compete as a Canadian act."

A good example is the money spent on their stage sets.

"When I look back we did really well for what we had to work with," she says. "We put on great shows, we did great sets — we’d go to Ikea with $1,000 to decorate our set for the whole tour — and we’re competing with bands that come from the States with semi loads of props and gear. There was lot of great things, there was a lot of sacrifice, there was a lot of missed family time but that’s what you do when you want it."

The trio imploded after a final tour in 2001 for a lot of reasons, Kelman says.

"We kind of just disappeared. There was 10 years of extensive travel and touring and recording and living together 24-7. By 2001, speaking for myself, I needed another outlet for my creativity. What happens when you’re part of a trio is that you get absorbed in that and forget who you are."

Egos and internal fighting were also the result of their exhaustive touring schedule. Samogard left the band and a brief experiment with another woman filling her spot in a trio renamed The Daughters quickly came and went.

"I think we just needed a break from one another," says Kelman, who adds it took years for the three to get over some of the hard feelings.

But as Farmer’s Daughter was winding down, Kelman’s personal life was picking up.

Kelman met Doug von Dersch in 1999. The retired CFL player (Edmonton, Hamilton, Montreal and Toronto in the late ’60s and early ’70s) was working as an investment counsellor. The couple had a son, Alex, in 2003 and were married this summer.

"Doug’s been incredible," she says "He’s a real hands-on dad with Alex and he lets me be a diva when I need to be."

Farmer’s Daughter regrouped for a show in Edmonton in 2008 and did a nine-gig, two-week tour in 2009 across the Prairies.

And while Kelman says she’s willing to do about 20 shows a year, many things have changed. Samogard and Leiske now live in Nashville, making rehearsals difficult. In addition, Kelman is the one member with a child, which has changed her thinking.

"It was a bit difficult for them to understand my world," she says. "When you have a child your priorities shift. Being away from Doug and Alex was very painful for me."

And of course it isn’t easy when you’ve been out of the spotlight for nearly a decade.

"When you stop producing records you’re lucky if radio stations will put you on their gold rotation of their oldies," she says. "You’re forgotten about very quickly."

Despite the challenges, the trio is considering some dates in 2011. It’s just a matter of making it work.

"Now it’s all about timing and budgets. It’s just such an expensive thing to do and gone are the days when I work for no money," she says with a laugh. "You’re going to pay me for my experience. I’m not 25 anymore. I can’t do it for exposure. I’ve got a kid and a mortgage."

She also has a restless need to create.

 

She recorded a bossa nova album called "Cafe Brasilia" in 2001 in the final months of Farmers Daughter. She still hears tracks from it played by a local radio station when she goes to her cabin on Vancouver Island.

(The CD is now available as a double album, after she added "Casa Do Samba" in 2008, a nine-song CD of ’70s and ’80s hits done with a salsa/samba groove.)

Kelman thought she needed to broaden her musical horizons so she opened a musical school in her house. She and her student-teacher (who started training with Kelman at age 14 and is now 22) host 11 classes a week with about 70 people enrolled ranging in age from kindergarten students to seniors.

She also assembled her dream band, an eight or 10-piece retro Motown-disco outfit called Polyster Philharmonic. They primarily play casinos and corporate shows.

"It’s doing stuff that I loved as a teenager, all of the stuff that made me want to be a singer."

Her teen years led her one way but motherhood had finally inspired her to finish a project in a completely different direction.

In 2004, she released a children’s CD called "Angela May’s Magnificent Musical Menagerie" which garnered her a Juno nomination in 2005.

Kelman was putting together the followup to the children’s CD when she noticed the first song that she’d written was very visual. It occurred to her that it would make a fantastic kids’ book.

The story then takes an unexpected detour back to the Wheat City.

She was visiting her parents Molly and Pat in Brandon not long after their neighbour had died. A niece and nephew were cleaning the house up and Kelman met them. The woman happened to be an expert in self-publishing.

Kelman went to a seminar the woman was doing in Vancouver a short time later.

"It was the best thing that ever happened because it kicked my butt," she says. "You can sit and go ‘I’m going to a children’s book’ but if you actually don’t know how to take the steps, you’re never going to start it."

The woman’s company, for a fee, provides a writer with a coach, an editor, a layout artist and an illustrator. Kelman instead chose a Quebec-based illustrator, Francois Boutet.

"He gets my humour," she says. "I just send him the words and he totally gets my humour. It comes through in the illustrations."

The books are aimed at children aged eight and under.

"They’re sing-a-long books," she says. "They’re a stand-alone book — you can read it just as a book — and then it’s got a CD attached in the back with me singing the song. If the child is a pre-reader, the little guy can flip the pages and hear the song and start to recognize and sight words by the pictures and what’s going on in the story. There’s also a karaoke track so that when they know it well enough they can sing it. And then there’s sheet music."

The first book "Frank the Cat," came out on July 31. The second, "Disco Dinosaur" was released Nov. 15. "Funky Monkey" will be out by March.

She plans to do the first three herself with the hope of finding a publisher that is interested in putting out another nine.

The books are now available at Coles in the Shoppers Mall in Brandon or at her website singalongbooks.ca.

She’s been thrilled with the reaction.

"The response has been huge. The kids love it, the parents love it. It’s just so fun for everyone. It really encourages kids to sing and to read."

A potty-training CD is under consideration but she’s taking January off in the hope of finishing another book that pulls her back into her adult music world.

Her time at the renowned Musicians Institute in L.A. was an eye opener that two decades later has her writing a technical manual for singers.

"I really learned some great things there. I learned everything that I was doing right as a vocalist and the things that I had to fix as a vocalist. I’ve since taken that foundation and really expanded upon it for my own vocal coaching and I’ve written a manual called ‘The Five Point Singing System.’ Basically you can be a better singer with the five points."

She’s also found time to host the B.C. Country Music Awards in October with Jessie Farrell.

It’s related to a yet-untapped dream of hers, to host her own television show. She did a kids’ pilot for a show five years ago but it didn’t go anywhere.

In fact, she jokingly says she wants a career similar to the late entertainer Shari Lewis.

"I would love to do TV but now with the Internet the way it it is I could have my own station and my own website with all of my little television snippets are on there. There’s so many ways to go about it and we’re just starting to scratch the surface talking to people who are savvy digital media marketing. It’s just so daunting."

With exciting challenges ahead of her and a fulfilling career and family life, Kelman is finally in a position to reflect on more than 25 years of performing. She says the first half of her life was about career and the second half will be about maintaining a balance between career and family.

It’s also provided her with clear insight into what she accomplished.

"I think I’m finally getting to that place in my life where I can give myself credit where credit is due," she says. "For a long time I couldn’t. It’s a funny thing, this business. I can be all over TV and stuff and feel like I don’t deserve it or something. I don’t know what that feeling was. But now that I’m well into my forties, it’s like ‘Yeah, I worked really hard and I deserve it.’ It was fun and it continues to be fun.

"It’s not over."

 

» Perry Bergson is a Sun copy editor. In his decade as the Sun’s music writer, he interviewed Angela Kelman five times as a member of Farmer’s Daughter.