Norm Walker

In His Own Words

I aspire to make people laugh, feel and think. I tried to present these songs to you as true to the traditions that inspired them, respectful and true to the sources of inspirations (people and stories), and true to my own sensibilities. In many ways, this music is intended to be a multi-dimensional slice of life: varied (musically and topically), complex and yet simple, light but also serious at times. Life is not one dimensional and neither is this collection of songs. - Norm Walker

Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts

Dear Friends & Gentle Hearts

The relaxed, intimate feel of this album makes the listener imagine that Norman is right there in the living room performing a live house concert. - Moira Cameron, Canadian Folk Music .

As I was inspired by many others, I hope that at least a part of this recording does the same by resonating with the current as well as future generations of listeners, writers and singers. - Norm Walker

front cover for T-Time: Time-Tested Tales - Tall & True

T-Time: Time-Tested Tales - Tall & True

Walker has a penchant for straddling the line between the things that make folks laugh, and those they have to laugh about to keep from crying. - Chuck Molgat, Prairie Dog Magazine

Lament for the Prairie Giants, an elegy for the vanished grain elevators of Saskatchewan, is impeccable in its meld of vocals and guitar, building a surprising emotional charge in its unadorned simplicity, with a tune as stately as the buildings it commemorates. Canadian Folk Music

if you can't at least smile at some of these story-songs, there's probably something wrong with your face.

Songs or stories?

Norm Walker doesn't call himself a storyteller but rather a "story-singer". Even so, the storytelling communities, locally and nationally, have embraced what he does as within the realm of what they call "storytelling". Some call him a "contemporary folk singer". Whatever you call him, at the very least he is an "entertainer" who uses music and stories as his main vehicles, often with tongue in cheek.

a sense of being grounded

Dear Friends & Gentle Hearts

A while past, I had the opportunity to live with my grandparents a year. Every other week, I would spend a couple of hours sitting with my grandmother, perusing one of her photo albums and listening to the stories she told with each picture. No matter how many times she showed me these snapshots from her past, I loved to hear her remembrances; it always gave me a sense of being grounded. That is how I felt listening to Norman Walker's latest CD. Each song was like a snapshot in a photo album, and his thoughtful singing interpreted the stories behind the pictures.

Norman's own view is that anyone can and should archive their own stories or those of loved ones, and ought not to wait for someone else to do it. Being endowed with a talent for songwriting has provided Norman a unique method of archiving the stories of the place where he lives (Saskatchewan) and of the people he knows or has heard about from others. Admittedly, the word "archive" calls to mind something very academic and dry. Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts is anything but.