The ghosts and Christine Fellows

I love the way Christine Fellows doesn't follow the rules and structures of pop music. On her new album, Femmes de chez nous, there's a song in completely free time. She only realized that when she tried to add some overdubs to her vocal and piano tracks and was told it would be impossible.
I marvel at her ability to do what sounds right to her despite the conventions of music. I had a wonderful interview with her and only wish I could have had more than 350 words to write about her album and the DVD of the live performances she did as part of her artist-in-residency program at the Musee de St-Boniface Museum in Winnipeg. It was inspired by the story of four nuns who travelled from Montreal to Winnipeg by canoe in 1844. It took months, and when they arrived, in the middle of the night, people could hear them singing as they came down the river.
I mean almost anybody could be inspired by that, but Fellows made a beautiful album about Franco-Manitoban culture out of it. And though she's not religious, she said that a series of weird things happened to her when she was finishing the project—a hard drive crash that forced her to re-record some of it, some funding that was promised but didn't come through, things breaking down and getting lost. The film editor told her that the nuns weren't finished with her yet, and she had to go back to the museum. So she did, and she said she “may or may not” have hidden some sort of offerings to appease the ghosts. Whatever she did, it worked.