DAVID LARONDE

Launches

EASTERN CANADA TOUR DATES: ON|NB|PEI

Featuring Award-Nominated

Album I KNOW I CAN FLY

For Media Airplay Listen/Download I KNOW I CAN FLY WAV | Mp3

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TORONTO – Teme-Augama Anishnabai singer-songwriter DAVID LARONDE performs contemporary roots, folk, rock, and blues. Laronde, who lives in Temagami, ON, will embark on an Eastern Canada tour to promote his latest of three full albums, I KNOW I CAN FLY, out now on all major platforms. Laronde begins touring June 21 in Northern Ontario on Bear Island, then hits New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island in July, and ends up in Toronto, ON, on October 12 at the Avenue Road Performance Academy. See below for a full list of tour dates. For more information please visit any of the artist links below and at his website. Laronde’s debut album Right City Wrong Town was nominated for APCM Awards’ Best Blues Album in 2013. Then came Under the Raven’s Wings, and then his third album, I Know I Can Fly – which received a nomination for Indigenous Songwriter of the Year from the Canadian Folk Music Awards in 2022. Given this history, audiences already know that his storytelling is sharp, and his music is uplifting. As Laronde says, "Music transcends all. The message in my music simple. In this great land of ours, let’s use the strength and power from our ancestors – who thrived for thousands of years, holistically, physically, and spiritually connected to Mother Earth. We all have the power to live free and healthy just by being aware of our connection to our ancestors." That said, Laronde IS ON A MISSION. This tour brings him to Canada’s East Coast to walk in the footsteps of his own Deny de Laronde ancestors, to feel and experience the history at Port Lajoie (Charlottetown), PEI, France-Acadia-PEI-Ottawa River valley. On this tour, folks will get to know Laronde’s latest album I Know I Can Fly. It’s a quietly powerful meditation on the perseverance of loving relationships and personal freedom through all sorts of challenging circumstances. It features crisp acoustic guitar, compelling vocals, and gentle but captivating production throughout. "I Need You" offers a simple confession of timeless, eternal commitment, while "Run With My Father" combines a Roma feel and haunting vocals with an unusually wordless chorus. Laronde says the song is about feeling free, and connecting to his parents, as he was running along a beach in Cuba. The gently rolling title track offers an evocative slide guitar, a distinctive hand drum, and a rootsy Americana vibe. Laronde says he wrote this song of freedom while sitting on a rock watching a gull float in the summer breeze. On the other hand, "Leonard's Lament," a dark, moody piece, with tremolo'ed electric guitar, was written for Leonard Peltier -- who's been in a federal penitentiary for the past 47 years, after being wrongly convicted of killing two FBI agents at the 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota. "Right Here For You" is about a teenage mother giving up her baby at birth and reuniting some 50 years later. Trumpets sound in celebration of the fulfilled quest to find each other. "Gonna Be Alright" is a lighthearted, bouncy, old-school country song of reassurance that relationships will last through tenuous times of lockdown and forced co-habitation. "Teen suicide on Canadian Indian reservations remains an unsolvable human problem," says Laronde. "'One Last Time' is meant to bring the listener into the aftermath of one such event." "Footsteps" is the most purely "folk" song on the album and is a personal account of the inner turmoil when making "moving on" decisions to end a relationship or an unsatisfactory job. "Lovers being held apart by circumstances due to COVID-19 are most noticeable at Christmas time," says Laronde. "'Where Are You' is about that void left when a lover is alone during the holidays." "I Carry Your Smile" is an instrumental about the ever-present smile of Laronde's mother Barbara Laronde (nee Turner). "When I smile, I think of her, and carry her love wherever I go," he says.