Orit Shimoni plays first Wheat City gig

Canadian singer-songwriter Orit Shimoni has spent years performing internationally as a nomadic artist, and this week she’s packing her guitar and suitcase to play a show at Brandon’s Park Community Centre.

Performing at smaller, intimate venues to make folk music more accessible for people in rural communities is what the Home Routes tour is all about.

“You can really feel the sense of community in the gatherings in a way that is a little bit different than like urban centres,” said Shimoni, who’s been performing across the Prairies this fall since her 12-show tour began on Nov. 24.

“I’m having the time of my life,” she said. “I love doing this.”

The evening concert on Sunday, which is the second-to-last stop of the tour, will be Shimoni’s first time playing for a Brandon crowd. In addition to admiring southern Manitoba’s snow-covered fields along her drive between shows, Shimoni feels grateful and jubilant to captivate an audience with her art and storytelling.

“One of the things I love the most about performance is making people laugh between the songs,” she said.

It’s meaningful and affirming to see people engage with her rhapsodic music by listening intently, singing along and moving their body as a form of self-expression.

“That joy in the room is something I can’t manufacture,” she said. “I can record an album, but I can’t capture that without it being a live performance.”

Home Routes was established to provide rural communities with access to world-class folk music and give musicians opportunities to tour across Canada and earn a living, said its president, Drew Caldwell.

The founders of the Winnipeg Folk Festival and the West End Cultural Centre in Winnipeg, Mitch Podolak and Ava Kobrinsky, started Home Routes in 2007 alongside Tim Osmond, he said.

The national organization arranges between 350 and 700 concerts per year across the country, Caldwell said. Five artists are on tour to end the year, including Shimoni, with three more musicians touring in January.

Caldwell said Brandon has historically had a thriving folk scene, which was negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but he’s hoping to change that.

“There’s a strong community in Brandon that has grown up with the Brandon Folk, Music and Art Festival, so there’s an audience base and we are reawakening that base,” he said.

“We’re really, really happy to have Brandon back as a host community for Home Routes.”

Artists take home 90 per cent of the ticket proceeds and the organization takes 10 per cent as an administration fee, he said.

Shimoni’s passion for singing combined with learning guitar around age 11 led her to take on a nomadic lifestyle as a full-time artist in 2010. She has played hundreds of gigs at cafés, bars, festivals, theatres, living rooms and for train passengers on Via Rail Canada.

Though she is thankful to be a singer-songwriter, there was a time when Shimoni questioned whether she would ever be able to perform for an audience in-person again.

In March 2020, Shimoni had booked a house concert in someone’s living room in Winnipeg, but it ended up being livestreamed instead because the world went into lockdown that week due to the pandemic.

“I was not only nomadic, I also didn’t drive. I did all my touring by public transit,” she said.

With no way out of the city amid new travel and social distancing restrictions, Shimoni felt lucky the host of the concert provided her with a safe place to stay until she figured out her next move.

The livestreamed performance felt like a premonition because it became the means for how she would share her music with the world during the next couple years.

“It was very distressing because everything I’d built for, you know, more than a decade just disappeared into thin air, and I didn’t know if it was coming back or not,” she said.

“The only thing I had control over was whether I could document and express what was happening, so I wrote a few songs in their basement and then met someone who offered to help record it in their studio and we made an album.”

Getting stuck in Manitoba’s capital city was the catalyst for her 12th album, titled “Winnipeg,” which was released in October 2023. The album resulted in Shimoni being nominated for a 2025 Canadian Folk Music Award for best solo artist of the year.

Winnipeg has remained Shimoni’s home base for the last five years whenever she returns from being on the road. It is also the place where she passed her road test to earn her driver’s licence.

“There was this catch-22 moment where I realized the only way I’m going to be able to leave is if I learn how to drive, which I had been putting off, like, my whole life,” she said with a laugh.

After years of performing and writing music, Shimoni said she has learned how to trust her artistic instinct, which comes down to knowing whether people will resonate with a song she’s working on.

“When I write a song, it’s because there’s like an overlap, a noticeable overlap, between something I’ve witnessed, thought about or experienced, and realizing it’s a bigger human phenomenon than just me,” she said.

“Something will just strike me, you know — an insight, or something someone says, or something my brain will say will just strike me as very songworthy, and then I just explore it.”

Shimoni sees music as her version of social activism because it helps people find common ground.

“I take that very seriously that there’s a lot of strife in the world, and that I can facilitate very peaceful, reflective gatherings of people through music,” she said.

Music can be a form of healing, and she’s often reminded of that when audience members speak to her after a show. It’s one thing to receive a compliment about her skills as an artist, but people telling her how much they resonated with her lyrics is “the best,” Shimoni said.

People attending her upcoming concert at the Park Community Centre on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. can expect to hear music from all her albums, she said, including her most recent EP with Dan Bern titled “Birds,” which was released in August.

» tadamski@brandonsun.com