Hot off a recent Western Canadian tour and a sold out cd release show at the Cultch Theatre in Vancouver, Hilary Grist's latest album Imaginings is on a musical roll.  Her songs have been in high rotation and charted in the top 30 on Canadian campus radio stations from coast to coast and have also been featured on many CBC Radio programs including 'DNTO - Definitely Not The Opera' and 'North By Northwest', as well as Lana Gay's ehList on CBC Radio 3.  Her music has also recently found legions of new listeners south of the border through the 'iTunes Indie Singer-Songwriter Spotlight Podcast' in the U.S. 

Hilary Grist might have gone to medical school had it not been for 80's bubblegum pop star Debbie Gibson, and she might’ve ended up as just another jazz noodler had it not been for a chance encounter with Norah Jones.

Now she makes music that combines Jones’ jazzy sophistication with the naïve pop whimsy of Regina Spektor, while dabbling in a variety of other styles like country, folk, cabaret, and orchestral.

On her third album, Imaginings, her “first child” with new husband/producer Mike Southworth, Grist offers up her first fully-produced, fully-realized collection of work—one that sees her worldly sound enhanced with some elements that are distinctly Vancouver:  Tim Tweedale’s unmistakable steel guitar and the Too Big To Care Marching Band’s unconventional brass embellishments, to name a couple. 

The album kicks off with “Stick of Dynamite,” which introduces the uninitiated to Grist’s soft-edged vocals and flirtatious phrasing and features some funky vintage Wurlitzer.  From there it moves through the quirky jazz folk of “About You,” the country strains of “Horizon,” and the cabaret stylings of “Back in Town,” before closing with the dreamy ballad “Save You for Last.” In addition to Tweedale (Headwater) and the Too Big to Care Marching Band, the huge array of guests on the album includes guitarist Dave Sikula (a Juno nominee with The Inhabitants), fiddlers Meredith Bates (Annie Lou) and Linda Bull (Plough); and backing vocalists Dawn Pemberton (No Shit Shirleys, Universal Gospel Choir) and members of the Parlour Steps, among many others.  Award winning film composer Don McDonald (“Kissed”) wrote the string arrangements. So how do Debbie Gibson and Norah Jones figure into this, you ask?

Well, Grist was a straight “A” student with a knack for sciences and an eye on medical school when a then-16-year-old Debbie Gibson showed up on the music scene with an album she had written and produced all by herself.  Suddenly, Grist, a grade 10 Royal Conservatory piano whiz, was inspired to go after a career in music.  Much to her parents surprise, after highschool the pre-med was shelved in favour of Capilano University’s well-regarded Jazz Studies program, which she attended as a Provincial scholarship student.  

Five years later Grist emerged with a music degree in jazz but then immediately rebelled by spending two years listening to nothing but country music and, later, to Sarah Harmer.  It was a chance encounter with a then-unknown Norah Jones that helped her reconcile her jazz studies with her own musical vision.  Seeing Jones, a friend of a friend, perform her first Vancouver show at Sonar, Grist rediscovered her love of the lyricism of jazz vocalists and realized she could blend this with her pop and country influences too.  Since 2005, Grist, who was born in Quesnel, BC and raised in Maple Ridge, has released two live-off-the floor album and 2 studio albums, and toured across Canada numerous times to support them.