It’s one thing to fall in love with old-time music and learn how to shred on clawhammer-style Appalachian banjo. It’s another to consciously live the life: hitchhiking and riding the rails while learning your craft and writing about your travels. Meredith Moon isn’t someone living in the past. She’s a young woman. She comes from a musical family, but taught herself to play banjo when she was 21 by watching YouTube videos. Then she hit the road playing solo alongside a folk-punk band, tapping into a DIY network that enabled her to book her own tours: across North America, Central America and western Europe, including Croatia and the Czech Republic — many places that don’t often see a young female singer-songwriter playing Appalachian-style banjo. With the release of Constellations, Moon is willing to do something she consciously avoided ever since she started writing songs: acknowledge her pedigree, the fact that her father’s name carries a lot of weight in musical history. Gordon Lightfoot is her dad.
“I’m proud of how far I’ve come independently,” she says. “I’ve built an audience around the world of people who are unaware of my family relation — they just like my music. That was something I had to prove to myself.”