On her sixth album, singer-songwriter Norma MacDonald explores new songwriting tactics, reimagines old demos, and conducts sound experimentations that expand her folk and country influences into 60s pop, Motown harmonies, and jangly early millennium indie-rock. MacDonald lives in Halifax and has earned multiple Music Nova Scotia and East Coast Music Award nominations for her 5 previous albums.

The opening chords of In Waves set the record spinning in January, but the mood is wholly autumnal: lush, then resolute. A harvest and a hope. In Waves may begin in winter, but it slips gently through the seasons. She and partner Chad Peck (of indie-shoegaze trio Kestrels) enlisted JUNO-nominated producer Daniel Ledwell (Jenn Grant, Fortunate Ones) at Echo Lake Studio in Nova Scotia.

“I didn’t realize I was writing about the pandemic when I wrote ‘Comes in Waves’ until probably a few months later,” she says about the latest track. “I think I had told myself that I just came up with this song about the desire to change everything about myself and feeling stagnant out of nowhere.”

MacDonald and Peck would challenge each other to write three songs in three hours to combat their anxieties and Netflix tedium during the pandemic when MacDonald worked as an ER nurse. Many of the songs speak to her experiences working in healthcare, and ultimately are about trying to move forward through uncertainty with lightness, and grace, and maybe a sense of humour.