hEIDI LiTTLE
Heaven on earth is Heidi Little’s dream of grandeur. It may seem unfathomable or naïve to some, but those doubts fall deaf on Heidi’s ears. I will fly or I will die trying. Her passion for music fuels her journey to brighten the world. She’s intrepid enough to start a tour in the United States with just $200 in her pocket. This was just a few years after she battled cancer for the first time and just after she had her son, Kian. After the cancer, she knew she had to pursue music or she’d be sick more often. With the little money in her pocket, Heidi decided to take the less traveled and scarier road to commit to making music for the rest of her life. She started writing songs and touring all over Canada. In 2003, the cancer came back as she was recording her second album. The second time around, doctors didn’t have the treatment she wanted. Ask her sometime and she’ll tell you about breathing in the white light…
After the second round of cancer, Heidi hit the road again. She pulled her son out of school, packed up a 1985 Nissan Pulsar and headed south. Heidi homeschooled Kian as they drove south to Mexico. The trip to Mexico was a search to find what she was missing in Canada. For five months, Heidi taught English and went from town to town in Mexico playing her songs, sharing her light. She fell in love with the country and its people and what she was doing. Playing music was what she needed to be doing with her life. Along the way and as she headed back to Canada on tour through North America, she wrote down the names of people she met and pieces of wisdom they gave her. The man who gave her the $10 she needed to buy enough gas to get to San Diego. The woman who told her to sleep in her car just one more night.
She stayed home for a few months, got a business degree, and headed out to tour again. This time, she got as far as Bangor, Maine, before a blown engine stranded her there. Her car had given out in Maine, but she hadn’t. She and Kian packed up two suitcases, her guitar and the dog she’d found in Mexico. They left the Steven King clouds and broke-down vehicle in Bangor to head to the live-music capital of the world, Austin. She’d felt a great energy there when she played a gig in the city the year before, but Heidi didn’t realize the lifelong foundation she was about to encounter. “That’s a beautiful guitar case,” a stranger told her at a party one night. When Heidi met Steve that night, she knew she’d found part of what she was seeking. Like so many times in her journeys, she trusted her gut, her instinct. Something clicked. A week later they married in a friend’s backyard under a Saturday afternoon sun. It was early summer and within three weeks, she had gotten married, found a new band and started recording her new album at Willie Nelson’s Pedernales studio.
In her journey, she’s won songwriting competitions, earned two degrees (one in theater, another in business), been picked up by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, raised a son as a single mother, beaten cancer twice, wrote an essay that had her shaking hands with the Queen of England—“very dignified and very British, very awesome,” she recalls, and welcoming in Prince Charles, and Prince Edward.
Hundreds of shows and thousands of people later, Heidi’s spirit is as strong as ever. People involved in her music are not merely musicians, producers, engineers or fans—they become part of her. They contribute. They collaborate. If she could have her wish, they would all appear in the acknowledgments section of her new album, Dreams of Grandeur. Heidi wrote each of the 12 songs on the album—sometimes on a napkin at a café in Monterey, others in a notebook on a beach while Kian romped in the surf. She surrounds herself with people full of energy and light who help her make her music—the music she was born to create. This album is her reference book, her diary, her spiritual manifesto and her hopes for the people who helped her get to where she is and for those whom she hasn’t had the fortune just yet to meet. The album will be released this fall.
Article written by Addie Broyles 2007
