ATHABASCA — Thursday, April 18 will mark the last performance of the Heartwood Folk Club’s Spring 2024 season as the sisterly trio hailing from small-town Saskatchewan known as Sister Grace take the stage at the Nancy Appleby Theatre.
Heartwood fans will get to experience the unique stylings of Mackenzie Seguin, Madeline Gardner, and Saidi Gardner, three young women who grew up St. Walburg, Sask. They picked up an interest in music from their father, Sheldon, and got their start playing in a family band with the rest of their siblings.
“There’s six of us kids. My oldest brother would play the bass,” said Mackenzie. “My other brother would play the drums, and then me and my twin and my oldest sister would sing.
“We have another sister—there are four of us—but she didn’t ever really get into music,” she added. So, we actually named the band after her, and that’s why we’re called Sister Grace.”
Although the girls are older now, Mackenzie said the girls do occasionally have to deal with sibling situations.
“Back when we were in high school, we would fight all the time when trying to do our music,” she said. “But now that we’ve grown apart … and we’ve become parents, so I think it made us a little bit better, where if something’s bothering us, we’ll just speak up about it and then we’ll fix it.”
Influences and roots
When asked to describe the group’s sound, Mackenzie said their inspirations are varied and their genres are at times hard to pinpoint.
“We have always been told that we have a mixture of sounds. We don’t have one specific sound,” said Mackenzie. “People have told us we sound country, or we sound folky, or sometimes we sound bluesy or raw.”
She listed Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Kings of Leon, Milky Chance, and Chris Stapleton as artists currently influencing the trio’s style, and said their set, which used to be composed of covers, will feature original tracks written by Mackenzie and Madeline.
The song-writing pair are actually twins, and at age 24, they both reside in St. Walburg with families of their own, while older sister Saidi, 29, lives in Calgary. Mackenzie said since her family moved to rural Saskatchewan to be closer to relatives when the children were young, their roots have remained an important part of their identity.
“We always tell people where we’re from, and they’re like, ‘Sorry, where is that?’” said Mackenzie. “It’s big to us that we do come out of a small town.
“Another big thing is that we’re Indigenous too,” she added. “That’s a big part that we’re trying to get out in the world.”
Despite being separated from their older sister over the winter, Mackenzie and Madeline reunite with Saidi during the warmer seasons to perform gigs as a group — and this summer has promises of being a busy one for the group.
“We’re going to be performing at Ness Creek Music Festival, so that’s a big one for us,” said Mackenzie, a festival held in Big River, Sask. The trio also performs annually at Dog Patch Festival hosted outside of Loon Lake, Sask.
“We’ve also had three different recording studios approach us about recording music, so we’re hoping to be getting in there in the summertime,” said Mackenzie. “That’s probably going to be our biggest milestone.”
Advance tickets for the show can be purchased at Value Drug Mart, Whispering Hills Fuels, or Athabasca Health Foods for $30. Tickets at the door will be available for $35, and admission for those 16 and under is free.
