A little drinking song written about the lifting of the moratorium on coal exploration in the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

To have your say on coal mining in our watershed, visit https://cpawsnab.org/our-work/coal-in-alberta/

Live performance recorded in Studio A on CJSR's It Takes a Village and engineered by Miles Wilkinson.

Performed by: Susan Isaac (guitar, lead vocals), Jessica Nelson (tambourine, backing vocals), and Keavy Martin (bodhrán, backing vocals).

Pour Me a Soda (We Can't Drink the Water).mp3

The Night Warblers are an eclectic indie folk trio from the Canadian prairies, where they live courtesy of Treaty No. 6. 

In the post-pandemic age, and with their children out of toddlerhood, these three re-emerging musicians began writing songs as meditations on motherhood, grief, and the politics of care; on power and inequality; and on questions of home, identity, family, and belonging.

As lead vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Susan Isaac says, “Writing a song is a funny thing: it usually tends to come out of deeply personal experiences I struggle to talk about, and yet on some level, there is always a desire to share it. It is a powerfully addictive thing to create deeply personal music that rings true for others.”

The band’s first releases include I Didn’t Think to Tell Him, a ballad of loss and enduring love following the death of a parent; Infinite Colours, a folk-country love song celebrating gender diversity; and Like a Child, a folk-rock cri de coeur originally begun in the 1970s by Susan’s singer-songwriter mother, Carol Isaac, and recently completed by the band.

Marked by a wayward approach to genre, The Night Warblers’ sound is comprised of three-part harmonies and a range of vocal styles by Susan Isaac (lead vocals, guitar, fiddle, piano), Jessica Nelson (lead vocals, mandolin, accordion, harmonica, percussion), and Keavy Martin (backing vocals, bodhrán). The band also specializes in creative covers revealing the strange shadow sides of songs that inspire them.

Driven by experimentation, collaboration, and play, The Night Warblers make prairie folk music for the 21st century.

