The Next Chapter: How Alberta expat Sykamore is taking Nashville by storm, one metaphor at a time

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When Sykamore, a Carseland native, was still a relative newcomer to Nashville, she often spent her free time in Franklin, TN. It is a town 30 kilometers south of Music City that is known for attracting Civil War buffs and for its abundance of charming antique shops.

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Sykamore, born Jordan Ostrom, had a lot of downtime back then. He still hadn’t made many new friends in Nashville and lived in the backyard of Carolyn Dawn Johnson, a singer-songwriter who often rented her garage to Canadian expats new to Nashville. One day, while searching an antique store in Franklin, Sykamore found an old Ford Pinto owner’s manual from the 1970s. This subcompact car became famous for all the wrong reasons in the early 1970s, when it was he found that even minor collisions could cause it to catch fire. Given that this controversy would have occurred long before Sykamore was born, he admits that he really doesn’t know why he was aware of this obscure piece of 50-year-old automotive history. However, he was fascinated by its potential as a metaphor.

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“I thought maybe I could write a song about a young couple driving a beat-up car and it’s a metaphor for their sometimes toxic but very exciting relationship,” says Sykamore, in an interview from her home in Nashville.

Thus Pinto was born. The title track from her debut full-length album, out August 12, was written on acoustic guitar shortly after Sykamore arrived in Nashville in 2017. A year after arriving in town, she released her second EP. Self + Medicine, which was partly recorded in Nashville with a group of Music City session pros, but was made up of songs she’d been saving since releasing her 2013 independent debut, Petal. Pinto was meant to be the centerpiece of a new album with a new sound and was scheduled to be released in 2020. COVID scuttled those plans. Instead, he took five songs and released an EP called California King. Those songs are also on Pinto and since then she has released a steady stream of singles, including the nostalgic summer pop anthem Just 4 July a few weeks ago. So while Pinto may have started it all, it’s also one of the few tracks on the record that most fans of his have yet to hear.

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“I felt exactly what I had been wanting, which was a real departure from my last project, but it still felt like me,” says Sykamore. “This song became the focal point of the rest of the album and I knew right away that I wanted to call it Pinto. From there, I started co-writing and just showing people this song and being like, ‘This is the muse.’ Everything has to point to this song. I was just open about this being almost a concept album in a way. Helped inform the process. We started writing all these songs that had a similar sonic vibe and contextual vibe and built this album.”

Sykamore’s career has continued to evolve since he wrote Pinto on his acoustic guitar in Johnson’s garage. But her career has always benefited from some sharp turns, including the “pretty weird experience” that brought her to Nashville in the first place.

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She moved to Music City after being discovered on Twitter by singer-songwriter Rhett Atkins, who was impressed and wanted to help. He convinced her to come visit and this eventually led to a deal with Home Team Publishing, a company Atkins started with her son, country superstar Thomas Rhett. It was a big deal, especially for a farm boy from Wheatland County who had spent years in the trenches of Alberta’s busy independent country scene.

“I left my whole world behind,” says Sykamore. “My whole family lives in Alberta, practically, and I grew up there. It was the biggest jump I’ve ever taken personally. It was the biggest adjustment I had to make. There was a lot of nostalgia and I was actually wondering if I wanted to be a musician for a while. At the time, it seemed like it cost too much. I couldn’t see my family and it was hard. I had to make a decision: Right now, I feel like I want to quit, but if I quit now with all these opportunities in front of me, I will basically never forgive myself. I can’t leave just because I’m scared, that’s such a horrible ending to the story.”

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It was the right decision. She eventually began recording with Nashville producer Michael Knox. Known for his work with Jason Aldean and Kelly Clarkson, he helped Sykamore develop his sound with material that would eventually end up on Pinto. The album is packed with witty pop songs that maintain enough of an accent to appeal to mainstream country radio. That includes the catchy party-pop of Local Singles, the heartthrob piano ballad Out of Luck and the folky California King, a delightfully tongue-in-cheek raising of the middle finger to a hopelessly vain would-be suitor.

In early March 2020, Sykamore made her debut at the Bluebird Cafe, a rite of passage for emerging songwriters in Nashville. The night before her March 4 debut at the iconic club, a deadly tornado tore through Tennessee, leaving her Nashville condo without power for five days. She played anyway. But in a couple of weeks, the pandemic hit. Nashville’s Lower Broadway, a usually bustling area of ​​the city filled with live music, has become a ghost town. It was a surreal time and place to release California King, but Sykamore felt the EP marked a new chapter in her life and she didn’t want the momentum to fade. Now that Pinto is out, she says that she starts another chapter.

“I’m up to my neck in the next record,” she says. “I like to think that the beginning of this album was when I moved to Nashville and have now lived here for almost five years. In a lot of ways I still feel like I’m new here, but in other ways I feel like I’m getting my feet wet and I feel a little bit more comfortable here and that makes me feel more comfortable as an artist trying to belong here. and find a slot. The release of this album and the second album, it feels like it marks the end of that first chapter in Nashville and we can now move on to Chapter 2.”

Pinto comes out on August 12.