Photo Credit: Georgia Lloyd
Milwaukee-based singer and songwriter Martha Cannon jokes about the irony behind the title of Lady Cannon’s new record, Fortune’s Darling, due March 8. “The songs and experiences contained in them are not lucky. They’re not fortunate,” she says. “[The phrase] is something I heard in a bar. I wrote it down and found it in a notebook later. I don’t even remember where it was said. I just loved the way it sounded.”
Fortune’s Darling, which was recorded and completed about two years ago, is the long awaited follow up to 2012’s Whiskey Dear. The record exhibits that same kind of folk with fervid intensity heard in the band’s debut, as Cannon delves deep into tales of yearning and heartache.
But the reconfiguration of the band’s lineup adds another exciting layer to Lady Cannon’s style of Midwestern Americana. On “Run Away,” Cannon sings “Do you remember when you wanted me to write a song about you? Well, baby—this is fucking it.../I hope you get what you deserve, you deserve so much,” before swells of strings and percussion take over the closing verse. Songs like “Somebody’s Baby” and “Wild Beast” showcase Cannon’s honeyed vocals juxtaposed with her sharp, candid form of songwriting.
Cannon has called the Midwest home for about a decade, but she hails from Pomeroy, Wash., a small town 30 miles west of the Idaho border, with a total population of just a little under 1,400. “I grew up on a very little farm and it was very picturesque,” says Cannon. “We didn’t have television until I was in middle school. I feel like I was kind of raised by nature.”
The town is starkly contrasting with some of the more well-known sonic landscapes synonymous with the Pacific Northwest. “It’s not Seattle,” she jokes. “In the country, you have conservative talk radio, oldies and top 40. My dad had some really cool records. I feel like his musical taste helped me be interested in music.” It was through her dad’s collection that Martha was introduced to everything, from Black Sabbath and ’70s Welsh rock like Budgie to Nirvana. “Other than singing in church choir, there were no women that I knew of that did anything musically. It just didn’t seem like something people did.” It wasn’t until her mid-20s that Cannon started singing and figuring out how to play guitar. “I sort of just fell into it,” she says.
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Not long after the release of Whiskey Dear, Martha Cannon put Lady Cannon on the backburner. The separation between her and her husband changed the dynamics of the band and Cannon contemplated walking away from making music altogether. “It didn’t really work out well after we separated,” she says. “I didn’t want to play music anymore.”
She grappled with uncertainty, but it was through spur of the moment jam sessions with drummer Devin Drobka that Cannon began playing music again. “He would come over my place and we would just play, and then he sort of just started pulling other people into it.”
Lady Cannon was revived with a new assemblage of local jazz musicians like cellist Pat Reinholz, guitarist Andrew Murray Trim and bassist Barry Clark (who also plays in Milwaukee indie-folk outfit Field Report alongside Drobka), all of whom are featured on the band’s upcoming release. “It’s a whole different game playing with trained jazz musicians. They work the songs so differently. It’ll just be me singing with like two chords, and they make it into this beautiful thing that’s got layers and textures.”
Though Cannon reveals that some of the hesitation in releasing the record around the time it was originally completed was due to feeling like the project had no “cohesive feel,” its structure of loosely connected vignettes makes it all the more intriguing. No two songs sound alike—take the poppier, almost shoegaze-like “The Time You Took the Bartender Home” or the gritty “The Axe Fits the Shape of My Heart.” The lush instrumentals throughout Fortune’s Darling playfully dialogue off of each other, as if they’re in conversation, as Cannon recounts a few escapades, along with falling in and out of love.
Lady Cannon plays Cactus Club on Friday, March 8, at 9 p.m. with Hello Death and Half Gringa.
