We were first introduced to Sykamore – Calgary, Alberta native Jordan Ostrom – in 2022 as she was preparing to release her debut album Pinto, which was nominated for “Album of the Year” at the 2023 Country Music Alberta Awards and has amassed over 10 million streams to date and were fortunate enough to see her make her UK tour debut in early 2023 with shows in London and Liverpool. After a quite 2023, in terms of releasing music, Sykamore released her follow up project to Pinto on March 29th in the form of the four track EP Through the Static, produced by Bobby Campbell and released via CMDSHFT on all streaming platforms. Upon the release of the EP, Sykamore stated “These four tracks illustrate the emotional journey of opening your heart and the many ups and downs that can entail – two songs explore the beginning of love, and two songs recount the experience of love coming to an end. I hope “Through the Static” reaches people, regardless of where they are in their love story.”
We caught up with Sykamore recently to reminisce about her UK shows; releasing Through the Static; touring plans; and of course, a little Calgary Flames and Snickerdoodle chat
Hello. Jordan, how are you? I'm good, how are you doing?
Yeah, not too bad, good to see you again. Yeah, good to see you.
It's crazy that it was last January that you were over here. That's right, I know, and it's so long ago now, but to me it still feels like I was just there.
Do you still look back at that trip? Because obviously, starting with Cavern Club was quite the introduction to performing in England The Cavern Club is such a cool spot to start with. Of course, I still think about it, and I just said to someone the other day that to have my first show in Liverpool, being in Liverpool for the first time and getting to play that venue meant I felt pretty spoiled for sure. And then obviously, London to follow up.
We are obviously hoping it won’t be too much longer till we can welcome you back. Well, I would love to come back. I'm really curious to see what the country festivals are like over there, because you've got a couple of them now, and obviously there's C2C, but I'm really wanting to come over and see what the festival atmosphere is like. That's kind of my goal for now, I don't know if it's going to happen this year, but possibly next year, so that'll be my goal is to work towards. When you were last over here, you had just released Pinto a few months earlier. Is it a bit surreal that it's been 18 months now before the release of Through the Static last week? I know! Time is just getting away for me, I feel. I just put out this new project, obviously, and as I was gearing up for it, it caused me to reflect on 2023, and I'm like, oh, I guess I didn't put out any music in 2023, which was like, kind of just happened, I guess. It's because I just kind of had my eyes on this project, and this ended up being the best timeline. I feel like it's been a couple years since I took a full year off releasing music, so it definitely feels good to get back out there and have the work flowing and in other people's hands.
Do you think that's going to help with this release, having that extra bit of time off rather than just constantly getting new music out? I think it helps, and it's honestly hard to take that much time off frequently in the climate that we're working in because no one's taking a day off! You want to stay relevant; you want to stay on people's minds, but I think it's beneficial to take some time and actually live life a little bit and then come back when you have material that you feel passionate about and that you're working towards. I think you may not be able to take a year off in between every album cycle, but I think it's good, wherever you can, to just achieve that stillness and be able to go back out in the real world and observe, because I think that's a big part of being a songwriter, is observing relationships and the human condition, and so anytime you can be mindful of those things, I think is good for your art.
With just the four tracks on the EP, was that always the idea, or did you trim it down to get to that number, or did it just work with that flow of songs? I think we ended up recording five or six, and there might be something a little further down the road this year where those tracks end up getting released in a slightly different structure, maybe, maybe not. I think the big reason why we just picked four was because doing a bigger body of work just takes longer, and you need more time to plot it all out, and so we had these songs done, and like I said, I hadn't released any music in 2023, and so part of it was honestly me chomping at the bit, just wanting to get something out, knowing that people have been asking for what I've been working on. So I thought, well, I can do this, I can give a taste of what I'm working on and the direction that I'm going in, and then I can go back into the lab and kind of keep working and keep building upon it. It's sort of similar to 2020 as I put out an EP called California King, and those were five songs that ended up being on Pinto, and that was supposed to just be a service to the audience, and just wanting to put out something, and be like, here's a just a little teaser of what's to come, so I think this was the same vision for this project as well. What's the reaction been like from this release? It's been really good, I mean, it's been funny because since being in the UK and finding out that we have some fans there, it's been interesting to see the overseas reaction, and this time, I think, probably more than any other time, was interesting because obviously the album comes out first where you are before Canada, and I had a few people, after midnight or so, posting about it on Instagram or DMing me and being like, it's so good, and then at first I'm kind of like, how are you hearing this? And then I realised that it's out, and it's been released overseas because you guys are six to eight hours ahead of us, and so that was a really cool experience. I've been teasing these songs quite a bit on TikTok and stuff, and so I think people were really ready to hear the full thing, and so it's always great to hear that people like it, first of all, but also just that they've applied it to their own lives and that they can see their own stories in the songs, and that's always really special.
You've also put a couple of tracks to radio in Canada, with Highway Towns has just going to radio. I've done many of these drives through Alberta and BC, so is it a bit surreal knowing that some of these towns that you base this kind of track off are going to be hearing that song on their local radio? Yeah, that's a good point. I don't know that I ever actually thought about it that way, but yeah, that is kind of surreal that it's like a full circle moment in a way, because it's sort of is. A lot of these towns along the road are the ones that inspired the song to even come to life, and then it's almost like it's just going back to where it was born in a way, so yeah, that's a really great way to think about it.
Well, you do kind of, as you're constantly changing onto the local radio, aren't you, as you drive, especially even just going from, like, Calgary up to Edmonton, you have to change station a couple of times, or heading through the rookies towards BC. You do. I'm impressed with all of the geological places that you know.
Oh, we were in Calgary last Easter. So then do you have a hockey team that you cheer for?
It's the Flames, but come on, we don't admit that much at the minute, do we? Just, as long as you don't say Oilers, I don't really care. It was a real nosedive at the end of the season, and I don't know if that's strategic so that they get a better draft pick next year, or what it is, because they're sending in their younger guys to get them conditioned and all that, and so I think this is our second year in a row that we haven't made the playoffs. I'm hoping next year we've got a lot of new players and there's a lot of great new chemistry that I think is working, so I'm hopeful for next year for sure.
Do you kind of get to the Preds games much in Nashville or when the Flames come to town? I try to, I feel like on average I go to maybe one or two a year. It's probably less than I like, but I went to one of the best games here because it was Nashville versus Calgary, and I wore my Flames jersey, and it was on Halloween night. It was this game where Nashville was up by about three goals, and it didn't look very good going into the third, and then we came back and we tied it, and then it was looking like it was going to go to overtime, and in the final, like, two seconds of the game, Tkachuk actually scored with his signature through the leg shot, and it was me and five other Flames fans in the crowd just going crazy, and it was the best because I'd kind of quietly given up. I was kind of like, well, we're probably not gonna win this one, and then it just was a wild third period, so it's a great story that I get to tell! I'd love to go to more Preds games because they're fun, even if the Flames aren't playing. It's a fun franchise, and the fans have all this banter and all these chants that you need to learn, and so they're fun to go just on their own.
You've never thought of putting yourself forward for a national anthem or anything? You know, I have a kind of policy about anthems is that I'm a little wary of doing them because I feel like if you do a good job, everyone's just kind of like, okay, good job, but there's always a chance that you forget the words or something goes wrong, and then that ends up being on YouTube forever, so I'm always a little scared. Like, I admire artists that do it, and they just have the confidence to step out and do it, and maybe there's a day when the weather is right and everything's lining up, and maybe I'll do it, but I'm a little hesitant to say yes to stuff like that. Just sticking to your own songs for now then! Do you get much of an opportunity to play around Nashville being based there? Well, the thing about Nashville is we have a lot of the in-the-round style, so me and maybe three other songwriters go, and it’s where a songwriter would go to showcase their talents in Nashville, not necessarily to bring a full band. Like, obviously, if you have a showcase or an album release party or something, that's a little bit different, but I feel like more often than not, myself and my peers, it's more you're going somewhere like the Listening Room or the Bluebird Cafe, and because this is sort of a special town in that people, they really do want to know the story behind the song, and they will buy tickets to hear those stories, and in lieu of any real big production value, and so that's kind of a little more what I found myself doing when I'm in Nashville. I played out around in the neighbouring states, and what's cool about Tennessee is it takes about two hours in any direction to get to a different state or a different city, and so you spread it out pretty evenly if you want to do a little tour or something. You can hit Nashville, but you can also hit Louisville and Atlanta and Memphis and Chattanooga and all those different cities, so, yeah, I do a little bit of that. This past year, I did mostly shows in Canada, and that was fun too.
Is there much kind of planned around the release to kind of perform it live? Yeah, I hope so, but I'm actually hoping that might happen a little more into the fall, but I am working on some summer dates, but they might look a little more just acoustic support, but as far as full band dates, I'm looking more towards the fall, towards the last quarter of the year, so hopefully that will all come together.
How do you think the EP compares in that acoustic sound and the full band sound? I think it can stand up pretty well because the thing about most of these songs is that's how they were written, as you know, acoustically, and so I could probably go back in my phone and find all four of them in some guitar vocal capacity, and sometimes it's fun also to just take a fully produced song and reimagine it, maybe change the tempo or change a few of the chords around, and then all of a sudden it feels like a fresh new song or just a cool reinterpretation of a song. I'm always really inclined to do that though because I love the acoustic, like the bones of a song. I think if it can sound good and it can have very little production on it, that's how you know that it's like the melody stands up and all of the foundation is really there.
You worked with Bobby Campbell on this release. How did that kind of come around? Yeah, Bobby and I have been friends for a long time, and he worked with me pretty closely on Pinto. He did all my vocal production and the programming, and he is a writer on one of the songs on this recent project and on Pinto. He did Go Easy on Me and Out of Lock, which are both on Pinto, and so we just were paired up as songwriters. We were writing for the same publisher at one time, and I was immediately impressed with him. He's what they call a track guy, so he's the guy that sits at the computer and is doing a lot of the engineering and demo building as you're writing, and he worked really fast, but he wasn't cutting any corners. He was very practiced and very good at what he does, and so I remember thinking, I have to write with him again. So, I kind of kept calling him and being like, hey, I have this idea for a song, and then eventually it turned into Pinto. I wrote Pinto by myself, but I always imagined what the demo would sound like, and I'm like, I have to bring this to Bobby because he can help me kind of flesh this out. So, he was kind of on the ground floor of my last record as well, just sort of figuring out all of that kind of synthetic, the synthesizers and all the cool pads and everything. A lot of that is him, and so we had such a great time together, and we've also really started to gel chemistry-wise with the vocal production because he and I both really geek out on harmonies and background vocals and all those different parts, so it was kind of a no-brainer when I wanted to start this next project. I was like, well, I'm going to do all of it at your house anyway, so you may as well get a production credit, and yeah, he's the best. I love Bobby.
You’ve got writing credits yourself across the EP. Is that important to you to kind of have your own lyrics in your music? It's very important. I think it helps me inhabit the songs themselves, and it helps me, I very seldom am writing from an experience that I haven't lived, you know, like I've either observed it in someone close to me or it's something that I've actually gone through. I'm definitely not opposed to taking an outside cut and maybe recording a song that somebody else has written, but at this point I do feel like it's really imperative, even just for my branding, and I'm still kind of coming up as an artist. I really would like to be known as somebody who writes most of their music, and so I feel like it just helps me put myself right in the centre of the project, and I can sort of be there right at the inception of the album because I'm on the ground floor in the writing room, so I think it just helps me be centred in the project and know exactly what I want to say and how it's all coming about.
As I said, we'd love to have heard more than four songs though I'm not gonna lie! So hopefully we can get some more soon. The feedback has been pretty good, but I've had a handful of people be like, it's a little on the short side. Sorry about that, but there's more to come! There's a song called More Where That Came From, and as I was starting to tease these songs out, I tried to say in a couple different posts, believe me when I say, there's more where that came from, and it was sort of a nod to the song, but there's more that I have that I'm working on. I just need a bit more time to figure out where everything's going to get placed, but I've definitely got more in the chamber to share.
Well, hopefully we can welcome you back here soon as well, because as you said we've got some great festivals, which having seen you play live, I think you’d be a great addition to the line ups. Especially as we’ve had so many great Canadian artists play them over the years like Tim Hicks, Tenille Townes, Tebey and Dan Davidson Yeah, I mean, I'd love to be over there for the festivals at some point, that's on my bucket list, for sure.
And finally, before we finish, Jamie still orders the snickerdoodle, so don't worry, it's not been forgotten about. That's so funny, because I feel like, I think that's technically what it's called, but I seldom actually say it, because I'm afraid that there's some other interpretation of it, so lately, I've been doing the, the order ahead, and you can't write snickerdoodle anywhere, so I have to just do it manually, and be like, it's just a grande latte with these two shots, but I love that he still orders that, and that he took my advice. I think it's a great drink, it's just, it's not too sweet, but you get a little kick of something. I recommend it.
We’ll keep doing our bit this side of the pond! Thank you so much, really appreciate the time, Jordan It was great to catch up.
You will be able to find more information and future tour dates on her WEBSITE and keep up to date with her socially through TWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOK.