Lindsey Walker has had some weird experiences on stage.
In the past, she played a show in a bar while a major sporting event was being broadcast on the television.
A random woman came up to her and asked to use her microphone to make an important announcement.
Walker dutifully complied and lent her the mic which she immediately used to amplify a screaming obscenities-laced tirade at people cheering for the opposing team.
“Really things that no one should hear,” said Walker. “So that was strange.”
A manager kindly escorted the hyped-up sports fan off the stage and the show resumed.
Expect similar hijinks when Walker takes the stage at Infinitea T-Bar on May 25 and performs her brand of cinematic, apocalyptic, rage rock. The show starts at 8 p.m. and there is no cover charge.
The Edmonton-based artist has an unbelievable voice and lyric-writing talent to boot. From her chosen genre she sings about weighty subjects such as love and heartbreak and death and destruction but “in a more humanistic way.”
“I don’t want to say my life is just an all over the place map of me emotionally and spiritually, but it kind of is,” she said.
“My brain has these Jekyll and Hyde personalities,” she continued. “So the songs I write have these dark components.”
The sadness of some of her songs can be pretty overwhelming at live shows so she likes to add levity to performances with heartwarming and hilarious stories about her life and the things she’s witnessed.
“I’ve always been a funny person because I was a weirdo growing up,” she conceded. “So humour was the way that I could really connect with people.”
Walker has taken a strange road to get to where she is, genre wise.
Her parents put her in piano lessons at a young age. They later gave her a trombone, though she doesn’t “know why they did that.” As a young adult she would go on to study musical theatre at the University of Winnipeg.
She started performing in rock bars during her rebellious years and then played in a few folk bands before deciding to write her own music.
In 2013 she was nominated as an “Artist to Watch” at the Edmonton music awards, where she played her debut album Our Glory to a sold-out crowd. She’s traveled the country performing on ViaRail trains through their Artist Onboard program and her eagerly anticipated new record This Desolate Bliss is being released in the fall.
She’s proud of the treasures she’s picked up while navigating the rough seas of working and living as an artist.
“As an artist you see everything in a different light, everything is a beautiful composition. It means your heart is open a lot more in order to experience these things and process them,” she said. “The highs are always incredibly high and the lows are incredibly low. I wouldn’t give it up for anything in the world, although sometimes it makes it hard to connect with normal life and the muggles of society.”