She dedicated the album to the memory of her grandmother, who’d often sing Gaelic lyrics to the songs while she was learning to play the fiddle as a child. In 1997, she signed a deal with Warner Brothers Canada that not only brought her into the limelight at home, but also began to expand her audience by introducing her to American and international audiences with the release of NO BOUNDARIES. #MOTHER NATURE NATALIE MACMASTER TV#Her world tour included spending four weeks as the opening act for The Chieftains, and she also found herself doing jingle music for TV commercials for Tim Horton and General Motors. The following year, Rounder assembled enough material from her first two independent cassettes to comprise A COMPILATION, which featured classic Cape Breton traditional tunes she’d learned from masters like her uncle Buddy MacMaster and Winston Fitzgerald, as well as a number of local area composers, including Dan R MacDonald and Jerry Holland. Her star was already shining so bright that she was the headliner for the US leg of Carlos Santana’s ’95 world tour, performing in front of as many as 80,000 people. Mostly sets of strathspeys and reels or jig sets with the occasional waltz thrown in for good measure, she received an East Coast Music Award (ECMA) as Best Roots/Traditional Album. Recorded at Halifax’s CBC Studio prior to her signing with Rounder, it was produced by Glenn Meisner and Dave MacIsaac, and featured a number of Nova Scotia’s most prominent musicians, including Tracey Dares and Howie MacDonald on piano and bagpipes extraordinaire Jamie MacInnis. She caught the attention of executives at Rounder Records who released FIT AS A FIDDLE in 1993. She was a sensation on the east coast while releasing a pair of self-produced independent cassettes on Astro Custom Records – FOUR ON THE FLOUR in 1989 and ROAD TO THE ISLE barely two years later at the tender age of 18. By the age of nine she was taking formal lessons with her cousin and future fellow fiddle master Ashley MacIsaac, with whom she often performed with onstage early in life. Born in Troy, Nova Scotia, Natalie MacMaster grew up with music in her home, with both her parents playing in local bands and the niece of Cape Breton fiddle legend Billy MacMaster.
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