Interlake songwriter soars to new heights

In 2011, a decade before a pandemic renoviction caused Bobby Dove to fly the coop from Montreal, the swaggering trans troubadour snuck onto the bill for an annual birthday tribute to another folk singer with identical initials.

“I was not on any list of any kind to play, I just knew it was going on, and I was absolutely, as they say, feeling myself,” recalls Dove of the Bob Dylan show.

At the time, Dove was mostly busking and playing with an outfit called the Honky Tonk Heartbreakers.

Dove (who uses they/them pronouns) waltzed into the venue without a ticket, telling the doorman they were a performer before being waved backstage. Behind the curtain, organizer Mitch Melnick knew something was amiss, but decided to cut the young songwriter a break, putting Dove right in the thick of the all-star bill.

Dove hardly had a moment to think twice, and it turned out all right. Even with an out-of-tune guitar, the singer rambled their way through The Cuckoo by Jack Elliott, joined onstage by a banjo player who seemed to be waiting on standby.

“He tuned his banjo to play with me because that’s how green I was, but here I was, playing for a sold-out audience, so that was at the beginning of Bobby Dove.”

Ever since that bold debut, Dove followed romantic intuition and lyrical inspiration along the Trans-Canada Highway. After releasing two albums — 2013’s Dovetales and 2016’s Thunderchild — as a standout of Montreal’s anglophone folk scene, the songwriter decided to head west.

With a third album, Hopeless Romantic — co-produced by Rheostatics’ Tim Vesely and Blue Rodeo’s Bazil Donovan — already in the can, and with their apartment suddenly thrust above their modest price range, Dove was told by the universe to give Manitoba a try.

“To quote the Chicks, I wanted to be somewhere with wide-open spaces,” says the artist, who already had an affinity for the province after playing gigs at the Times Change(d) and the Brandon Folk Festival.

So, amid the first COVID-19 lockdown, Dove, along with their senior cat Salem, landed in Oakburn, a short drive west from Riding Mountain National Park.

The whole world was shut down, and “here we were in this tiny town with a gas station, a grocery store and a credit union,” says Dove, who lived in a century-old farmhouse across from a cemetery and next door to a man named Ed and his daughter Jolene; they taught Bobby Dove how to garden and grow.

Five months later, Dove moved to Brandon, which felt like a culture shock; it took some time for Dove to find like-minded folks. As an attendant at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, which was open with some pandemic-era restrictions, the musician befriended another non-binary musician, discussing songcraft and prairie poetry as the vaccines rolled out.

In the spring of 2022, after contemplating a move to Winnipeg, Dove wound up taking up residence in the Interlake, where they still reside today. That summer, Dove made their first appearance at the Winnipeg Folk Festival.

It was then, on the heels of Hopeless Romantic’s critically acclaimed release, Dove began working on a followup record, Fortune Teller.

Released independently in April, the 13-track album — featuring Did I Speak Too Soon, an Ernest Tubbsian duet with Grammy-winning songwriter Jim Lauderdale — is a tour-de-force of self-assured Canadian Americana.

Though Bobby Dove’s live band features top Manitoba artists — fiddler Caitlin Baker (Mitchell Makoons), Eric Lemoine (Little Miss Higgins) pedal-steel player Dan Russell (Sean Burns), guitarist Chris Dunn and drummer Joanna Miller (both of Leaf Rapids) — the record spotlights a who’s who of Canadian players, including percussionist Dani Nash (Andy Shauf); steel player Aaron Goldstein (Kathleen Edwards); and Saskatoon-raised songwriter Ellen Froese.

Produced by Goldstein, the record — whose other highlights include a moonlit elegy to Dove’s cat Salem, who died last year at 21 — was mastered by Mark Hallman (Brandi Carlile).

Though Dove officially celebrated the record’s release last month in Montreal, the adopted Manitoban will play another hometown show tonight at the Times Change(d), a venue that inspired the Fortune Teller track Billie Holiday. Winnipeg’s tofusmell gets the music started.

Next up, Dove plays Saturday afternoon at the Riverbank Discovery Centre for Brandon Pride, followed by a gig Sunday in Eastend, Sask., for the Big Flat Folk Fest.

In September, Dove — along with Lauderdale, Peguis’s William Prince and Brandon-raised songwriter Liam Duncan (Boy Golden) — will play the prestigious Americanafest in Nashville.

winnipegfreepress.com/benwaldman