Having honed her sound, Paige Warner thought it was about time she recorded some music. The result, her debut EP Revealed, will be released next month.
The 2015 Wellesley Idol winner, Warner is immersed in music, teaching it four or five days a week and spending her weekends doing gigs.
“That’s pretty much my life,” she laughs. “I love it. I wouldn’t ask for it to be any other way.”
Early on, she performed covers and worked on developing both her own voice and writing her own songs, focusing on stirring lyrics and the catchy melodies of contemporary R&B. Now, the Heidelberg resident feels she’s found what she’s looking for, making it time to release an album.
“I’ve wanted to for a while. It’s been a long time coming,” she says, noting she waited until she was happy with the direction of her music. “People have been asking me to record something for a while.”
The EP to be released May 11 is fittingly entitled Revealed: she’s now ready to let her songs be heard.
“This is me as an artist revealed.”
In writing, she finds some songs come to her all at once while others come in pieces, are tweaked and crafted over time, some of them going back to her high school days.
“One of the songs on the EP, ‘From the Start,’ just came to me. I was sitting on the dock at the cottage, and I had this overwhelming feeling that I had to write a song. I went inside and got my guitar … and I wrote that song in one go.”
Warner grew up in a musical family, listening to the jazz and blues artists her father enjoys. Some of that can be found in her own music.
“Each song has its own hints of other genres in it,” she says of those she’s penned.
In the R&B vein, she points to the likes of Eva Cassidy and emerging artists such as Daniel Caesar and Jacob Banks as influences.
Though Revealed is her first recording, Warner started with music at an early age. From essentially busking outside the market even before she reached high school, the young music aficionado moved on to booking her own shows. Things got a little more serious – and a bit more scary – when she first entered the Wellesley Idol fray in 2013, where there were not only audiences but judges. She admits that her first kick at the can didn’t go as well as it could have, but she kept at it and, by 2015, took the crown at the competition.
The entire experience was helpful, she says, continuing to build on her stage presence.
“It was great. Just getting on stage in front of people was a big step. The more times I do it, the more comfortable I get.”
That’s important, as she’ll be out performing shows in support of the recording following its May 11 release on all the online platforms, including a stop at Block Three Brewing in St. Jacobs on May 18.
Having grown up in the new digital reality of the music business, she knows that the online stage is a way to get the word out, drawing people to the live shows, which in turn drives interest in the recordings.
“At this point, I’m just trying to get my music out there, trying to get people to hear my music,” she explains.
Links to that music can be found at her website, www.paigewarner.ca
