Heather MacIsaac, JUNO-Nominated Musician and Antigonish's Best-Kept Musical Secret

Justin and Anuj sat down with Heather MacIsaac—a pharmacist by day, and as of this year, a JUNO-nominated composer—to talk about her debut album The Moon’s Daughter, her long and winding road through competitive piping, performance anxiety, and the kitchen ceilidh culture that makes Antigonish’s music scene unlike anywhere else.

What Even Is Trad Music?

If you’re not already in the scene, MacIsaac is a patient and generous guide. Traditional music, she explains, is simply the folk music of your people — and in Antigonish, that means a rich, layered mix of Scottish Highland, Irish, Acadian, and increasingly global influences that have been blending together for centuries.

The instruments skew old-fashioned by design: fiddle, bagpipes, whistle, bodhran, accordion. Simple holes in a stick, as Justin puts it. The point was never complexity — it was the melody, the room, and the people around you.

What’s striking is how porous the tradition actually is. The Cape Breton fiddle style that most people recognize didn’t come from one culture — it evolved from Acadian, Irish, Scottish, and Newfoundland influences all swirling together over generations. First Nations fiddler Morgan Toney has carved out his own genre he calls Mi’kmaltic. The bouzouki, now considered a staple of Irish trad, arrived from Greece in the 1960s. The tradition, MacIsaac argues, has always been about absorbing and adapting — not gatekeeping.

From the Living Room to the JUNOs

MacIsaac’s path to a JUNO nomination is not a straight line. She started with classical piano, fell hard for competitive piping as a teenager, and was soon travelling to Scotland and Ontario to compete at an elite level — playing alongside some of the best pipers in the world, including composers whose work she was performing every week. The experience was exhilarating and suffocating in equal measure. The little tunes she was quietly writing on the side never seemed worth sharing. Why would they, when she was surrounded by giants?

Performance anxiety eventually made the whole enterprise feel more like dread than joy. She stepped back from the competitive world, but the music never really left her. It just went deeper underground.

The turning point came through a low-key Irish session started by Susie Murphy — whose family runs Big Barn Little Farm — at a local pub. Murphy had encountered the Irish session culture firsthand while studying farming in Ireland, where anyone could walk into a pub, sit down, and play tunes that were common to the culture. No audition. No pressure. No perfection required. When her sister opened a pub in Antigonish, Susie brought the format with her.

For MacIsaac, it was a slow but genuine transformation. She arrived at those early sessions deeply anxious. But the format — learning by ear, playing along even when you didn’t quite have it yet, valuing the melody over the technique — gradually helped her unlearn decades of classical perfectionism. Music stopped being something to be judged and started being something to share.

The Album: A Legacy Project in the Best Sense

The album itself grew out of something even more personal than musical ambition. The loss of her mother prompted MacIsaac to reckon with everything her mom had invested in her musical education — every lesson, every competition, every long drive — and how little of it the world had ever seen. Around the same time, she was navigating a divorce and coming to terms with not having children. She found herself thinking about legacy. About what she would leave behind.

“I don’t want this to just end up in the landfill someday,” she said of the decades of tunes she’d written and kept almost entirely to herself. Where fiddlers in this tradition have long had a culture of debut albums — Natalie MacMaster, Ashley MacIsaac, both did them young — pipers traditionally waited until they’d won every major competition going. MacIsaac decided that was a rule worth breaking.

The Moon’s Daughter was recorded at Lakewind Sound in Cape Breton with engineer Mike Shepard, Cape Breton piano legend Mac Morin, and Antigonish’s own trad musical genius Mary Beth Carty, and every note of it MacIsaac’s own composition. Every tune, every song, written by a woman who spent years convinced her work wasn’t worth sharing. The JUNO nomination suggests otherwise. MacIsaac credits Carty in particular with helping her find her footing as a performer, gradually coaxing her onto stages by having her accompany Carty’s own shows on whistle and pipes until performing stopped feeling impossible.

Antigonish’s dual JUNOs presence

In a remarkable footnote, MacIsaac isn’t the only Antigonish-connected act nominated in the Traditional Roots Recording category this year. Cassie and Maggie — whose grandfather played fiddle at the same kitchen parties as MacIsaac’s grandparents — are also nominated. Their family roots run deep in the same local music tradition, even if they grew up in Halifax. For a town this size, that’s not a coincidence. It’s a testament to something real that has been quietly happening here for a very long time.

The winner will be announced at the JUNO Gala on March 28th, broadcast on CBC Gem. MacIsaac is going — and she’s given her extra ticket to Shepard, whose studio also worked on Morgan Toney’s album, which is nominated in the same category.

A Scene Worth Finding — and Supporting

MacIsaac’s larger message is an invitation, and it comes with some urgency given the current climate of arts funding cuts across Nova Scotia. She’s measured but clear about the stakes: a place without culture is a place without a reason to visit. The music, the language, the traditions — these aren’t decoration on top of the tourism economy. They are the economy, and they’re also something much more than that.

She’d love to see traditional music integrated into school curricula the way it has been in Ireland, where kids can learn pipes in school and pursue degrees in the music and history of their own people’s culture. That hasn’t happened here yet, but she thinks Antigonish — with StFX, the Coady Institute, and the depth of musical tradition already present — is better positioned than almost anywhere to try.

In the meantime, the scene is alive and genuinely welcoming. The Maples hosts sessions. The local museum has shows. Rebecca Wilde teaches strings from classical through Celtic. And the sessions themselves — the informal, social, anyone-can-play gatherings that are the beating heart of trad culture — are open to all comers, whatever your instrument, whatever your background.

“You don’t have to be from that background to enjoy it,” MacIsaac said simply. “It should be celebrated and enjoyed by everyone.”

If you’ve been curious but felt like an outsider looking in, this episode is the best possible place to start.

Listen to The Moon’s Daughter here: