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Ojibway artist Nick Sherman to play 2016 Bella Coola Music Festival

Singer-songwriter, Nick Sherman, gives new meaning to “the voice in the wilderness”
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Ojibway singer-songwriter Nick Sherman will be making his Bella Coola debut this summer

Singer-songwriter, Nick Sherman, gives new meaning to “the voice in the wilderness,” or rather, the voice from the wilderness. While he still calls his rural birthplace of Sioux Lookout home, Sherman spent much of his youth out on the land, moving between his hometown, the small First Nation community of Weagamow Lake, and his family’s trapline on North Caribou Lake.

It was here in the depths of the Northern Ontario forest that his family members would play guitar as they tended their trapline, and Nick found himself soaking in songs and lyrics.

His songs are not only inspired by his memories of those early trapline sounds - the timeless hymns of celebration and lamentation on his reserve - but by great songwriters including William Elliott Whitmore, Ray LaMontagne, Sam Cooke, and Elvis Costello.

His gentle voice is rich with honesty and the vitality of youth, but tempered with world-weariness, atop his strong, simple guitar. Nick's deeply personal songs about “the best and worst days of the last four years,” are inspired by the lives of people in his community, his own upbringing and life experiences as he now raises his own family in Canada's north.

In this way his Indigenous heritage resonates with soul-brushing candour as he sings the boreal forest blues.

Nick released his first full-length album, “Drag Your Words Through”, in January 2012 ; He released his second full-length record, “Knives and Wildrice”, in May 2015. You can catch this talented Indigenous artist at the Bella Coola Music Festival on July 23 and 24, 2016.