Ontario Festival of Small Halls: Meredith Moon

Event Description

Meredith Moon isn’t someone living in the past. She’s a young woman. She comes from a musical family but taught herself to play banjo when she was 21 by watching YouTube videos. Then she hit the road playing solo alongside a folk-punk band, tapping into a DIY network that enabled her to book her own tours: across North America, Central America and Western Europe, including Croatia and the Czech Republic — many places that don’t often see a young female singer-songwriter playing Appalachian-style banjo. Bars, art spaces, house shows — it didn’t matter to Moon: “I booked everything through the travelling punks and the old-time scene—which are honestly quite similar.”

With the release of Constellations, Moon is willing to do something she consciously avoided ever since she started writing songs: acknowledge her pedigree, the fact that her father’s name carries a lot of weight in musical history. Gordon Lightfoot is her dad. “I’m proud of how far I’ve come independently,” she says. “I’ve built an audience around the world of people who are unaware of my family relation — they just like my music. That was something I had to prove to myself. Now that I’ve done that, as my dad gets older, there’s a push to proudly share my family history.”