“… bottles the songcraft of truly gifted artists and ideas embedded in their culture… As roots music goes this is one of the strongest albums of the year. ”

~ Lonesome Highway, Ireland (2024 - Velvet Paintings album review)

LONG BIO

VELVET PAINTINGS - BY MATT HORSEMAN

On the third Leaf Rapids record, Velvet Paintings, veteran Winnipeg songwriter Keri Latimer makes room for the world. Over a lush palette of roots music—ethereal folk, driving country, and wiry honky-tonk—she shifts her gaze to the environments around her, observing and reflecting on their movements and the movements of the people who direct their motion. While the JUNO Award-winning Latimer has always been a keen seer and interpreter of places and people— as evidenced on Leaf Rapids' globetrotting, identity-investigating 2019 album Citizen Alien— she's never focused her pen outward to the extent she does in the songs of Velvet Paintings. 

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SHORT BIO

CINEMATIC CANADIANA, MANITOBA MOTOWN OR SPACEY SPAGHETTI WESTERN, CRITICS CAN'T DECIDE

Leaf Rapids is a small isolated town in Northern Manitoba where Aurora Borealis graffitis the winter skies. It is also the borrowed moniker of this Winnipeg band featuring sweet and smoky harmonies, luscious guitar licks, the eerie sound of the theremin, and a bassline that walks the talk.

Keri Latimer, Devin Latimer, Joanna Miller and Chris Dunn are realists and dreamers. They are chemistry professors, dry-wallers, child rearers, and custodians of the night that croon about love as it applies to vultures, barbershop stabbings, satellites and velvet paintings to name a few. 

 

2025 ROOTS ARTISTS OF THE YEAR !

Collective career highlights of the band include winning a JUNO Award while giving birth, being signed by Nettwerk Records, scoring an Academy Award nominated film, appearing in the movie, "Cool Runnings", playing at a party for Sean Penn, and scooping a songwriting award from Bryan Adams.