What would you like listeners to get out of listening to your album?

“I would like people to know there’s many different shades of Indigenous identity, there’s not one story of Indigenous identity, there’s many varieties of what makes up the identity of an Indigenous person. So, I want people to know that it’s not what you see in an Indigenous study 101. A lot of that is what you call Pan-American or Pan-Indigenous culture, what I try to do is go right to the communities and community stories and peoples stories, right to the heart of the song carriers and the people themselves.”
Meeting Myself at Raven Street is a narrative storytelling acoustic album about the greatest Canadian Indigenous singer-songwriter you’ve never heard of - until now.
There are 1,748 kilometers between the Cree community of Moose Factory, Ontario and Music City USA - Nashville, Tennessee.
In 2006, Kevin Schofield embarked on a musical journey and made a pilgrimage with his guitar to live out his dream of playing music on the same stages of his childhood heroes and musical influences from Johnny Cash to Hank Williams. For Kevin, the journey wasn’t just about the promise of being discovered but a form of therapy to try and quiet the psychological demons that most men take to their graves.
That trip changed his life in unexpected ways.
A self-taught country music singer-songwriter, Kevin started life living a traditional Cree upbringing on a trapline with his grandparents, through his early ages and teen years he e was sent away from his community to live in a boarding school in North Bay as a teenager, and when his mother relocated to Toronto, he would follow behind during summer vacations and hone his musical craft busking on the streets of Toronto. As an adult he continued to busk and play open mic’s, never gaining any notoriety and lived on the margins. He eventually married and moved to Ottawa where he tried to integrate into the music scene without success. Eventually his marriage failed and weeks after his divorce from the mother of his two children, Kevin made the journey to Nashville. Kevin’s vocal style was reminiscent of Johnny Cash and an early fan dubbed him “The Tennessee Cree” (a play on Cash’s back-up band the Tennessee Three). Armed with a new moniker and a sense of purpose Kevin returned to Ottawa but was felled by a stroke that left him in a coma and when he came to, he had lost the use of his left arm. Not being able to play was a fate worse than death – Kevin spiraled downward, but his son Gage came to his aid – he put the guitar around his shoulders and lifted his arm to allow him to strum two chords – this small gesture gave him a hope that he might play again. In a little more than a year Kevin returned to playing open mic events in bars and busking on the streets of the Nation's capital. His hard work, perseverance and determination seemingly paid off when he was given an opportunity to perform at an Indigenous music event at the National Arts Centre only to suffer a great humiliation when his “big break” was canceled without explanation. Although the traditional career path has not favored him, Kevin found a patron who has booked him studio time and recorded his first studio album of his songs that will be released on May 1st, 2022. This collection of original songs and lyrics are poignant, stinging tales of witnessing major cultural and lifestyle shifts in his community and speak of the inner psychological turbulence of being born with Cree and Scottish descent. Meeting Myself at Raven Street is the coming-of- age album and story of Indigenous singer-songwriter Kevin Schofield, also known as The Tennessee Cree.