Canadian singer-songwriter Norine Braun carries on with her moving musical odyssey to heal and discover the self in ‘Journey Towards Wholeness’, which is her soul-rooted rock album. This album revolves around Braun’s story as an adoptee and her struggle to find herself and belong through Red River Metis connection. First of all, it is necessary to mention that “Journey Toward Wholeness” is not just a simple single, but a concept album, where Braun’s voice and a melodic search for the personal and cultural identity, as well as the journey of self-realization, are intertwined. The album has its twelve songs and was produced by Adam Popowitz – an experienced musician The music is enriched with diverse tracks and lyrics that feature Braun’s inner musical journey. The album starts with ‘Bring It On’ which tells people to suck it is a folk song where Braun sings soulfully accompanied by gentle piano and a snare drum.
‘Quest Before Me’ is the second song on the album and the song will provide you with an insight on the rest of the hymns in the album. It focuses on the heroic journey that every person goes through in life, the need to search within oneself, to move outside the circle without and become willing. Having powerful voice with hint of theatrics, Braun wants the listener to be paired down and reflect, using metaphors to do so.
The third song on the album, “Adoption” deals with a more personal story as it tackles the themes of feeling adopted. In Braun’s case, she raises issues to do with identity mode and the effort to create a stable identity throughout her childhood when she was raised away from her lineage.
“Abandon” provides the listener with the complex and fundamental notion of being left, which envelops the essence of the adopted person’s emotions and emotions related to being adopted. The album also has another sweet anthem named “Ascending Lullaby” that is dedicated to the memory of the departed mother of Braun. The performances outlined love, death, and the mystical migration in and out of bodies, as inspired by her mother’s passion for birds. Despite facing illness and adversity Braun’s mother experienced true happiness with them and even thanked them. The song also brings out the struggles faced by whippoorwills, whose environment is under threat due to one physical ordeal after the other.
The another single known as “Hunting Buffalo’‘ also specializes in history cost of Manitoba and a place where some of the Metis ancestors of Braun relocated to after the decline in buffalo hunting. From a musical perspective, this album involved the use of a myriad of instruments and facilitated the excellent display of talents. The band lineup is Norine Braun on vocals, rhythm guitar & spoons, Adam Popowitz on bass, lead guitar & hand percussion, Elliot Polsky on drums, Kathleen Nisbet on fiddle, Alice Fraser on keys & vocals, and Huggybear Leonard on blues harp. Bringing it into context, the whole album is produced by Adam Popowitz and the mixing and mastering by Rear Window Song and Sound make it sound very polished and seamless. Thus, just like any other album, the album embraces the joy and sorrow of life, as well as the different stages of life by singing in the cycles of life’s passages. Through the act of storytelling, Braun effectively gets through to the listener, progressing towards a state of awareness between the artist and the audience. It is that most artists cannot come as close to expressing life in all its complexities – family, race, relationships, joy, pain, birth, and death – as powerfully as Hidalgo has done here. It is for this reason that “Journey Toward Wholeness” offers listeners the gift of an emotional and visually engaging experience of Braun’s comfortable timbre and a melodic quintessence of who we are, where we come from, and why we were all bestowed with the journey of life. In conclusion, Norine Braun’s “Journey Toward Wholeness is a profoundly introspective and superbly written piece of art which illuminates the issues of femininity and spiritual searching.
