Musician Evelyn MacIver Pursues the Beauty in Melancholy

Evelyn remembers a little brown house at the top of a hill with a green metal roof and a chair by the windowsill. Inside, the air smells like wood smoke and the people seem happy. For most people, a house is a simple fact of life, but for Evelyn, it represented a radical shift in her geography. Before her mother bought this place, the family never stayed anywhere longer than three years. At thirteen, she did not write about typical teenage angst. Instead, she wrote about her mother and the pride she felt seeing her finally claim a permanent piece of the earth.

Music arrived long before the stability of the brown house did. Her mother claims she sang before she could walk or talk. By the time she reached her teens, she had spent four or five years in the Ottawa Children’s Choir. The group provided exposure and professional public stages, but the environment felt rigid and strict. When the family moved to Wakefield, she left the formal choir behind. She did not want to stop singing, but she needed to find a way to do it on her own terms. She eventually found a local open mic with her aunt and realized that doing her own music was exactly what she wanted.

Her father, a guitar player himself, accidentally sparked her solo path through a moment of doubt. Standing in a music shop when she was fourteen, Evelyn pointed at a ukulele and said she wanted it badly. Her father told her she would never learn to play it. She insisted on the purchase specifically to prove him wrong. She mastered the small instrument, but soon found its bright nature limited her creative range. She wanted a bigger sounding instrument. More importantly, she realized she could not write the heavy songs she felt brewing inside her on an instrument that sounded so relentlessly happy.

The guitar offered the gravity she sought. She started trying to teach herself the instrument right before the COVID pandemic. At the time, songwriting served as a therapeutic necessity. Her father lived in Israel for most of her childhood, and they had not shared a country since she was eight years old. She describes her early work as the product of an angsty teenager processing that distance. Eventually, her own perfectionism made these autobiographical songs feel too vulnerable, like an emo meltdown with blue hair. To keep performing in public, she shifted her lens and began telling stories about others.

One such story involves a man named Tommy at a pawn shop who passes on what little he has. Tommy met a girl named April when they were young, but she died in Maine. To Evelyn, the song is a celebration of love persisting through everything. She considers it a happy song. Yet, when she plays it, the audience often finds it sad. She does admit that most of her music sounds mournful, a quality she attributes to the raw combination of one voice and one guitar. She does not know how to fix that, but she focuses on what is beautiful, even if that beauty is sad.

This philosophy reached a peak at the Blue Skies Music Festival. Her life goal was to play on that specific stage because she had attended the festival for much of her childhood. Her grandmother first attended the festival at eighteen, and decades later, Evelyn stood on that same stage at the same age. She wore a long green dress borrowed from her aunt and stood barefoot on the wood. She did not look at the five thousand people in the crowd. She only saw her favorite people in the world standing at the front. In that moment, she realized singing made her soul shine regardless of whether she was “good” at it.

Evelyn now lives in a world defined by a love of music. She knows now that she could never exist without it. It’s a constant that keeps her grounded in the little brown house on the hill.