My Prairie Home Detail Page

Rae Spoon has stopped running from the big sky. With the release of My Prairie Home, the Alberta-raised, Montreal based musician braves a return to both musical and personal roots. Although Spoon has embraced an increasingly electronic sensibility on two previous albums, My Prairie Home harkens back to the atmospheric country folk that defined the musician’s earlier sound. It is the perfect vehicle for an album about growing up transgendered in a troubled Evangelical home.

My Prairie Home is the soundtrack to a NFB documentary of the same name, making its debut at the 2013 Vancouver International Film Festival. As such, it forms a loose trilogy comprised of album, film and Spoon’s semi-autobiographical novel, First Spring Grass Fire. The album, though, stands fully-realized on its own as a collection of starkly beautiful and surprisingly catchy songs. My Prairie Home begs to be listened to in its entirety, in a quiet room, to feel the full impact of the powerful narrative.

Musically, My Prairie Home mixes country, choral, and folk pop. There are still touches of electronica amidst the organs and the ukuleles, notably in the drum machine underpinning I Want and in the soulful reworking of Love is a Hunter. As always, it is Rae Spoon’s understated but heartbreaking voice, unquestionably their most powerful instrument, that truly shines on My Prairie Home. It’s a voice that lends disarming clarity to these disconcertingly honest songs. —National Music Centre