The penultimate show in the Tour De Fort 2025-26 concert series takes to the Townshend Theatre stage next week as a trio of young women bring their siren song to Fort Frances.
Jessica Pearson is the trio’s lead singer and plays guitar, and said the band’s music trends towards classic folk.
“I feel like we’re kind of Americana Folk, is what I would say we play, especially as the three of us when I play with my bandmates,” Pearson said.
“There’s acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, a lot of three-part harmony and our music is really about building community and connection with one another, with ourselves and with each other. There’s some sing alongs, there’s life stories and storytelling that we go through and then there’s some hard truths to talk about, we talk about mental health and struggles with that. I talk about that a lot, I’m diagnosed with depression and ADHD so it’s a lot that I talk about in my music and our storytelling in our show. But all in all, it’s really kind of folk, Americana music that’s about building community and togetherness and reconnecting with ourselves and each other.”
The band consists of Pearson and bandmates Sam Stone, and Malia Rogers.
“I play with Sam Stone who sings and does light percussion and then my other bandmate is Malia Rogers and she plays the banjo and mandolin and does background harmonies as well,” Pearson said.
“They both have their own groups they perform with and then they come on tour with me and we do a lot of singing together. I’ve been playing with Sam for about five years and Malia joined us about two years ago.”
Rogers visited Fort Frances last year as a part of Tour De Fort’s show featuring Ian Sherwood.
Pearson has had a long and winding journey with music, starting from a young age in a family that listened to a lot of music.
“I’ve been playing guitar since I was eight years old, none of my family members are musical, but they all loved music,” she said.
“So there was always music on in the house, in the car, wherever we went, and I just fell in love with the storytelling and the songwriting of it, and so I begged my parents for a guitar, and on my eighth birthday, they gave me a mid-sized Yamaha classical guitar with the nylon strings in order to learn on, and I learned enough chords to start writing songs, and kind of went from there.
“Music is like, it’s changed and developed a lot as I’ve grown up. I started in kind of, you know, kind of the folk world, the country world a bit. And then I went to indie rock. I was in a metal band for a little bit as well in high school, which is so hilarious. I did musical theatre. I went to college because my parents wanted me to get a post-secondary education. So I did musical theatre. Then once I graduated, I just kind of knew I wanted to come back to original music and storytelling and songwriting, and so I started working on that and playing with a bunch of different people, and kind of found my sound again and came back to the folk roots and classic country, americana style, that all about the storytelling and the story of the song.”
The group is currently based in Ottawa and has spent the last few weeks preparing for their upcoming tour which will see them visit towns across northwestern Ontario including stops in Sioux Lookout, Dryden, Red Lake, before hitting Fort Frances and then heading east towards Thunder Bay and wrapping their tour of NWO in Geraldton.
“We’re all a bit spread across the city, so we like to book some rehearsals some evenings. We get together, we pour tea, we talk about our day and connect and we start rehearsing the songs,” Pearson said.
“We’ll go through them, we’ll sing them, we like to start with the songs first and make sure we have all the parts we want, and harmonies. We work a lot on the harmonies making sure we’re singing the right notes but also trying different things exploring different ways we can tell that story and share that song on stage. One of my favourite things about performing live is that you can change it up, make it different from what the recording sounds like on the CD. Especially with this new album we’re working on, we’re finding new ways to play the songs live that kind of brings new life into them.”
Jessica Pearson and the East Wind perform at the Townshend Theatre on Friday, March 27, at 7 p.m. as part of the sold out Tour De Fort passport season. There are limited tickets available for the show at tourdefort.com.
