Brianna Lizotte’s upcoming album to focus on preserving family stories

Brianna Lizotte is no stranger to the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. She’s taken part in the festival’s Nikamowin programming for the last four years, but this year, she joined the main lineup. 

“It’s the same treatment, but just slightly different,” she explained. “It’s really cool to be able to be part of the workshops and to get a concert.”

Lizotte is a Métis fiddle player based in Edmonton with a Juno nomination under her belt. She plays alongside her husband Ethan Graves on percussion and her friend Francesco Rizzuto on the guitar.

“I grew up watching family videos that my grandpa used to take, so growing up listening to fiddle, listening to the kitchen party stories and all of those things, it was a huge part of my identity,” Lizotte said. 

She was about eight years old when the last fiddle player in her family passed away. There was a gap for about two years where nobody played the fiddle. Lizotte took it upon herself to revive the music in her family when she had a dream about playing the fiddle for her family. 

Preserving family stories and legacy through music

Her upcoming release is all about preserving those stories of kitchen parties and other family stories. The idea of recording those stories started when Lizotte was 16. She wanted to write an album dedicated to her grandma, but she kept pushing it off.

“Unfortunately, she had passed away last year and I was like, I regret my choices of waiting … for the perfect time,” Lizotte said. “You’re not going to have forever with everybody.”

But the person who recorded all of the kitchen parties was still around, so Lizotte pivoted. She’s been collecting the stories from her grandpa and going through the kitchen party records.

“It’s basically a preservation album of my family and trying to make sure that family legacy, whether it connects with anybody else or not, is preserved in a way that’s nice, and in a way that’s me.”

“There’s a song about [my grandpa] and his dad’s trap line,” she explained. “It’s kind of the story of him hunting with his dad, trapping with his dad, and using that as their income for like seven or eight years of his life in his teenage years.”

“It was really inspired to write a gritty, kind of edgy song that ebbs and flows through different tempos,” she added. The song is named “Mile 262” after the trapping line.

Telling stories without words

A lot of Lizotte’s writing starts with a theme that she builds a melody off of. Sometimes that melody will come from the land.

“It’s really cool to be able to listen to the land and also listen to other stories and whatnot and try to write something to that.”

Lizotte tells all of these stories without words, using only her fiddle and the instruments of her band partners instead. 

“There’s so many great singer-songwriters out in the world that I know that if I were to try to write a song with words, it wouldn’t really go that well,” she said with a laugh. 

“Being able to tell stories and kind of give some context before and after the tune I play, while also the tune itself speaking to the story, I think is really special,” Lizotte explained. “It kind of goes back to my grandparents and my great uncles and cousins that used to play, where a lot of the time, they didn’t have to say what the song is … they all understood.”