Jenn Grant draws on her family history for sometimes-heartbreaking songs
The Nova Scotian singer-songwriter is touring with a new multimedia show, Cradled by the Waves
Jenn Grant
Jenn Grant performs her multimedia show Cradled by the Waves at the BlueShore at CapU on March 7
HIS NAME WAS POPPY, and he was a red corgi. As Jenn Grant remembers it, the rotund little dog’s faithful companionship ended up being a casualty of her parents’ divorce. It sure wasn’t Poppy’s fault. After all, he had nothing to do with the eight-year illicit affair that Grant’s father had been carrying on, nor did the pooch get a vote when the singer-songwriter’s mother decided to pack up her two kids and move them—and Poppy—from Prince Edward Island to Halifax.
“We ate at the drive-through a lot,” Grant recalls when Stir reaches her by phone at her home in Lake Echo, Nova Scotia. “We all got a little bit fat that year, and so did Poppy. Then he had heart problems because of that. We couldn’t afford surgery, so we went on a TV show.”
The local television program in question had an adopt-a-pet segment, and Grant and her brother, Daniel, were enlisted to extoll Poppy’s charms to an audience of prospective new fur-baby parents.
“We were like, ‘He’s a good boy, and we love him so much,’” Grant says. “It was really devastating. And my mom felt really bad about that afterwards.”
The dog took his leave of the family, but he left an indelible imprint on Grant’s memory. Poppy’s story inspired her to write “I Hate the Violin”, one of the songs on her new album, Queen of the Strait. Over a backing that infuses old-country twang with a bit of Muscle Shoals brass, Grant layers a heartbreaking, raw-honey vocal that’s a little bit Patsy Cline and a little bit Iris Dement.
The rest of the album’s tracks are similarly drawn from significant moments in Grant’s life, and these songs form the basis of Cradled by the Waves, a stage show she’s taking across Canada. Each date will see Grant perform the songs from Queen of the Strait with her band—guitarist Daniel Ledwell (Grant’s husband), drummer Jamie Kronick, singer-keyboardist Kim Harris, and bassist Carlie Howell—but this is more than a concert.
Jenn Grant
Cradled by the Waves is a multimedia show that includes visuals by projectionist Jose Garcia-Lozano and cinematographer Daniel Grant (the singer’s aforementioned sibling) and interpretive movement by Tanya Davis.
“The overall themes of this show are really connected to hope and humanity,” Grant says. “I think this is a really important time to emphasize those things and focus on those things actively, when the world is going through so much.
“It’s not the same sequence as the album, because this show has a specific arc in the way I want to tell these stories of my life, and I’m hoping that people in the audience—or at home listening to the record—will be using it as a jumping-off point for them to tap into their own stories and then ultimately connect with their own love and loss and grief,” she continues. “There’s a lot of themes of grieving well in the show, something that I think is really important. There’s a connection to my ancestry that I’ve developed with edited film moments and found footage. It’s going to be really wild and fun and beautiful.”
The songs are rooted in Grant’s specific lived experiences and those of her family members, but she says she hopes their themes will resonate with anyone who has ever felt the wonder of love and the sting of loss. She offers “Seaglass”, a song inspired by the life of her aunt, as an example.
“A lot of that song is about when her baby died when it was three days old, and her grief around that,” Grant notes. “But also, for me, I’m connecting it to the grief that parents have felt all over the world, who also don’t really get to grieve well—like the mothers in Palestine with babies under the rubble, the mothers in Minneapolis with their children in detention centres. Families torn apart. It’s something that’s happening all over the world.
“There’s a moment there at the end of that song where I basically recognize that she’s one of the people in my life that has taught me to use my voice and be open,” Grant says. “But we had to kind of go through our own thing, because she was afraid of me speaking up about things that were political, or that seemed political to her.”
“And your wild heart/Taught me to be loud,” Grant sings, “And I can’t give it up now/So I hope I can make you proud.”
Indeed, Grant has never been one to shy away from tackling big issues with her work. In 2024, for instance, she released a pointed and mourning, but ultimately hopeful, single titled “Hello Everyone (Ceasefire Now)”, all profits from which go directly to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. You can purchase that track on Grant’s Bandcamp page, but don’t bother looking for it on the world’s biggest music-streaming service. Like a number of other artists, Grant has pulled all of her work off Spotify in protest of the company’s investment in military AI and its decision to run recruiting ads for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The songs on Queen of the Strait aren’t political, unless you count familial politics. Grant certainly mines her ancestry for lyrical material, but in her writing she is fair and generous to a fault, even when she arguably has no obligation to be.
“I have so much love for my brother and my mom that it’s really easy to honour them,” she says. “I have a complicated relationship with my father, so when I listen to those songs [that mention him] I feel sadness around that. I still feel like there’s a lot of beauty there. I think I look for the beauty in people, and it’s easy for me to find that and put it in songs.” 
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