Interview by: Chad Hutchings
Sticky Magazine joins Lindi Ortega on the road, in a manner of speaking.
If you haven't heard much about Lindi Ortega, don't expect that to last much longer. Her soaring voice and effortless charm are making her a stage favourite to an audience that's quickly spread well beyond the city limits, and her rootsy latest release, Little Red Boots, has been getting heaps of well-earned attention from some of media's biggest names.
Earlier this week, I was able to touch base with the Toronto beauty as she drove back north from a private showcase south of the border. With her punchy country sound fresh in my head, it was easy to picture her on the other end of the line, chatting while driving along some dusty road in a rusty old pick-up truck, windows rolled down and hair up in a handkerchief. But, because I feared hearing that she might actually be driving on the Trans-Canada in some new Prius that gets her fifty miles to the gallon, I kept quiet about the whole thing. Instead, we talked about music.
Sticky: Sooo, you had your latest CD release on Monday. We had someone in the audience, and it was supposedly a pretty amazing turn-out.
Lindi: Yeah, it was a great turn-out!
Sticky: Did you expect that kind of reception?
Lindi: I was pretty overwhelmed by the fact that we had to sadly turn people away. The fact that that many people were coming to the show was pretty amazing for me. It was very... surprising, I gotta say. I mean, I knew there was gonna be people, because it was a CD release party... but yeah, turning people away at the door was pretty surprising.
Sticky: Well you've been getting a lot of really good press lately, before and after the album release. How does that sit with you?
Lindi: It's great... I'm just happy that people are liking what they're hearing, and I'm happy that they're writing about it for other people to discover. I'm just glad that my record is finally out there!
Sticky: Do you feel any pressure, now that you're under this bigger microscope?
Lindi: I don't, no. To me, it's always about putting on a good show and writing good songs and performing to the best of my ability, and I always try to do that, so that's not really gonna change, ya know? And I always try to be myself. So no, I don't really feel any extra big pressure...
Sticky: Well, if things do keep snowballing the way they are for you, there are certain inevitable changes that'll happen in your life that come with fame. Are you worried about that?
Lindi: I never think about anything like that! I don't like to project myself too far into the future... thinking that it's gonna become a huge thing. [I] just kind of live in the moment with this... with what I'm doing. You know, of course you have goals and certain things you want to aspire to accomplish, but my main big goal was to put out a record that I was proud of, that I could stand behind and be happy to hand to somebody, and I've done that, and I'm very happy with the response that I've gotten. Anything else that happens from here on in is... I've said this before, but it's like icing on the cake.
Sticky: That album you just put out... first of all, you've been in music for quite some time now. Your earlier independent stuff, it wasn't quite in line with the alt-country you're doing right now, on the latest album.
Lindi: It wasn't as country... my first record was a little bit more vaudeville/cabaret, kind of piano driven, but there were a couple songs on that record that had slide guitar and had a country element to them. And then, in the other independent releases I did, it was even more so. There were maybe four songs that had a little bit of a country element. So it was just... a natural progression towards that anyway.
Sticky: What do you think brought this natural progression, as you say? Your father was in the music business...
Lindi: He's not anymore, but he was a bass player in a latino band for a part of when I was growing up, and he was definitely somebody who inspired me. It was my first time seeing somebody that I knew on a stage, and it was very exciting for me. I was mesmerized by the idea that my dad was on a stage, and it drew me to do the same thing. Because of him, we always had a lot of band equipment in our basement. We had a PA, and we had guitars, just all sorts of stuff... a piano... and I always tinkered around with all of it. I learned how to play on a classical nylon-stringed guitar that was sitting, it was actually on a wall in the basement. My dad had bought it for my mom to learn how to play guitar, and she kinda lost interest in it, so my dad ended up hanging it on a wall like you'd hang a picture. It was just kinda sitting there, and I was always fascinated by it, so I asked him to teach me to play a couple chords, and then I just learned the rest from there.
Sticky: And country, is this always the direction you'd wanted to take?
Lindi: You know, I always listened to it growing up. My mom was heavy into country, and I remember always hearing it, so it definitely became more of a direction I wanted to take with the records that I put out. And then, after I was released from my deal with Interscope, my label gave me sort of free reign to do whatever kinda record I wanted to do, and I decided to go full on with the rootsy, country, old-school type of recording.
Sticky: The last thing you did was way back in 2008, wasn't it? That's quite a stretch between that (album) and this one. Do you blame that long stretch on the label switch, the creative process, or... ?
Lindi: Yeah, I mean, it was a mix of things... certain legalities of getting in and out of a deal take time. It's not an instantaneous process, so there's a lot of waiting in between or those things, so that was part of it. And then, of course, there was having to write. We took four songs that were originally going to be on the Interscope CD and put them on this one, and then it was just writing the remaining eight songs as well.
Sticky: Gotcha. Now, you've been doing (and you have done) a lot of touring as a supporting artist for some pretty big names. Are you gonna be striving toward doing your own headlining touring soon? What are your plans for the near future?
Lindi: I think that's the goal! I mean, I think it'd be awesome to headline my own tour. I think every artist would love to do that. It's definitely something that I aspire to do at some point, and hopefully, with more people hearing this record, it might be more of a possibility than a dream!
