Simple Green Tea with Lemon and Honey

Ten minute tea with Afternoon Tea. Spend ten minutes with Afternoon Tea. In the time it takes to boil one kettle, and let one cup of tea steep, we will have your daily art + music fix covered. Take your afternoon tea break with our Afternoon Tea curators.

Today’s tea + soundtrack + visuals curated by Norma MacDonald.

On her sixth album, singer-songwriter Norma MacDonald explores new songwriting tactics, reimagines old demos, and conducts sound experimentations that expand her folk and country influences into 60s pop, Motown harmonies, and jangly early millennium indie-rock.

“The Heart Wants” was actually a song that was written back in 2011. However, it never fit in with her release at the time (her third album, Morning You Wake). Over the years, MacDonald tried rearranging and producing the song in different ways but it didn’t seem right. Luckily, MacDonald‘s band and producer Dan Ledwell didn’t give up on it and saw her vision through, capturing that dreamy sound that kept slipping through their fingers until now.

Stream + share + watch “The Heart Wants” now:

The Heart Wants

The upcoming album, In Waves (October 27), takes listeners through the seasons, starting with winter. MacDonald wrote the bulk of the track list during lockdown in which she and partner Chad Peck (of indie-shoegaze trio Kestrels) would challenge each other to write three songs in three hours to combat their anxieties and Netflix tedium.

Admittedly, I’m more of a coffee drinker. But when I do drink tea I tend to go for a simple green tea and add some lemon and honey. For authenticity sake, I brewed a cup and am sipping as I write this.

I’m going to try to tie some visuals, some music I love and my new single all together into one semi-neat package. I’m very lucky I have a painting by one of my favourite artists hanging in my living room. “Ghost Passenger” was painted by my friend Shelley Mansel for a show called “Relics” she was putting on for a local gallery back in 2011. Each painting was an underwater scene featuring objects that don’t belong there; a rubber tire, an abandoned net, etc. Around that time, I had just “discovered” Neko Case (late to the party, obviously) and was obsessed with her 2006 album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, and the song “Star Witness” in particular. The first line of the song is “My true love drowned in a dirty old pan of oil that did run from the block/Of a Falcon sedan 1969”. Whenever I would hear the words “drowning” and sedan”, it would conjure up the image of the old, rusty car in “Ghost Passenger”, inexplicably under water, with one windshield wiper mark across a mud caked window.

Neko Case

At the time Shelley was painting Relics, her husband (the incredibly talented and generally lovely Phil Sedore) was producing and engineering my third album Morning You Wake for me. They lived in a 3-bedroom apartment in North End Halifax—one bedroom was Shelley’s art studio and another was Phil’s recording studio. I’d sometimes sneak over to Shelley’s studio and watch her paint when Phil and I were taking a break. “Ghost Passenger” was my favourite of the show from the moment I saw it. I found
it so creepy and mysterious. I told her I was going to buy that painting someday and a few years later — I actually did!

Phil and I recorded about 12 songs for Morning You Wake; 10 of then made the recording. One that didn’t make the cut was a song I had written close to the end of our sessions called “The Heart Wants”. Although Phil and I both liked the song and played around with it a bit, we ultimately decided we had enough material already so we scraped it. Twelve years later, producer Dan Ledwell and I decided to give it another try and now “The Heart Wants” is the first single from my new album In Waves (coming October 27).

FYI, if anyone is in Halifax, NS (or plans to be here soon), Shelley Mansel just opened new show called Dwell at The Prow Gallery. It’s beautiful and timely and thought provoking. You should definitely check it out if you get a chance. Here’s some links where you can find more of Shelley’s art.