Ruth Purves-Smith often writes songs about the downtrodden and the destitute—good folks on the wrong side of privilege. Take the title track of her new album, Piano in the Field, which tells the story of a homeless woman living on a skiff of land at the edge of the road near Purves-Smith’s rural Alberta hamlet. The woman moved her son and worldly belongings to the field and then lost them one-by-one. First the boy, then her pickup truck and finally—when she herself moved on—the piano was left out to pasture. She just couldn’t get out from under what life had thrown her, a familiar theme in Purves-Smith’s music. 

Purves-Smith grew up dividing her time between the city, the ranch and her family’s 100-year old woolen mill in the sticks. Her parents were 70s back-to-the-land bohemians who would collect lichen in the woods and dye fleece in the bathtub before buying the old wool factory. They lived in a train station turned house that they had bought from the province for a dollar. She grew up wild, spending a lot of time alone on the land: building forts in the willow trees, playing in the mud, learning bushcraft and wrangling horses. She often felt so much a part of the natural world that she would forget how to use language altogether. But it would all come back in the evenings as she listened to her parents sing and play guitar by the fireside, her dad’s tenor voice entwining with her step-mom’s birdlike falsetto.