West Of Winnipeg

Speaking with Lindsey Walker is a strange experience. It seems that Walker, the vocalist for the Edmonton-based band West of Winnipeg, is living a double life. On stage, she stuns audiences with her booming voice, growling and hitting an unimaginably wide range of low and high notes along the way. Off stage though, her voice is surprisingly gentle and—for lack of a better word—feminine.

Walker laughs as I essentially confess that I’m surprised she doesn’t sound more like a man. She explains that after a long period of singing nothing but cover songs and emulating other people’s voices she’s only just recently found her own voice.

“I had been singing so many covers. I mean, I had written songs all my life, but I had always kind of emulated a certain singer,” Walker points out.
“Once I really got into writing and performing our own stuff though, that’s when my own voice came through—and it was this deeper, manlier voice!” she giggles, equally shocked. “And it’s definitely not something that I’m putting on, it’s just naturally what comes out when I perform the music that I have from my heart.”

It’s kind of funny then, that in a five-person band, Walker is the only female. The other four members of this part funk-rock, part blues quintet are all men.

“It’s really interesting actually, I’m definitely not a girly-girl. So, it’s nice being able to go and hang out with the boys.

“I think my, um, ‘masculine side’ has come out a bit more since hanging out with them,” she admits bashfully. “I drink beer a lot more often. I swear a lot more. So it’s definitely interesting.

“Our first ever tour, we went to Saskatoon and to Medicine Hat, which is possibility one of the shortest tours that anyone has ever done,” Walker laughs. “And we were sharing rooms and sharing beds and stuff and there were no guy-girl issues with that. It was cool, it was good.”

However, even though she claims that she’s just one of the boys, there’s no doubt that Walker still holds a special place in the hearts of her band mates. Firstly, as Walker explains, since she’s the only woman in the band she occasionally finds herself mothering her fellow band members, taking care of them, and making sure they’re all right. Indeed, some of them affectionately refer to her as “Momma Linds,” she admits.

Secondly, though, the band name West of Winnipeg was specifically chosen with her in mind. While the rest of the boys are from Edmonton and area, Walker explains that she only recently moved to Edmonton, from Winnipeg, to take the music program at Grant MacEwan College.
It was in the music program that a mutual passion for blues music brought these five together, and they started playing cover songs without any real band name. Eventually, though, they got tired of being introduced as “the Kids,” and decided that they needed to come up with a better moniker for themselves.

“My guitar player Drew said, ‘Well, you’re from Winnipeg, why don’t we incorporate that into the name?’” Walker recalls. “And then he thought, ‘Well, why don’t we do West of Winnipeg? Because that’s where we are and that’s where you’re from, and it’s kind of a neat cross-contamination of the two.’”

If they ever play in Winnipeg, I jokingly advise, they should consider playing under the name of “East of Edmonton.” You know, just to avoid confusion.

“Actually, one of our guys mentioned that,” Walker laughs. “It would be really funny, but then, you know we’d have to make new T-shirts and it’d be this huge event for us. And I don’t actually think we have enough money to make that many t-shirts.
“And then of course, we’d have to make another MySpace,” she jokes.
- Bryan Saunders, VUE Weekly