Mama carries a bag of fingers everywhere she goes. She lost one to a broken pinky swear, one to a wedding ring and one to a very badly timed rude gesture, and she adores it when you stare. She’s the star of the title track on ‘Bag of Fingers,’ the gloriously strange, funny and fearless new EP from Dundas, Ontario singer, songwriter and artist Joan Krygsman, out now.
Five songs, one big theme. “These songs are funny, strange, suggestive … and also vulnerable, defiant, a little absurd, and occasionally devolving into pure, surreal storytelling,” Krygsman says. “Little Spoon doesn’t want the complications of musical intimacy; No is about establishing boundaries; Poking the Hive comes out of the end of a relationship; Sid turns mismatched intimacy into an absurd love story; and Mama’s Got a Bag of Fingers is a dark fairy tale run amok.”
The road here took some twists. “My band Trout Lily started life as a duo with my long-term romantic partner. It re-formed as a five-piece built around the songs I wrote after the breakup and the pandemic. With washboard, upright bass, guitar, fiddle/sax and vocals, we developed an original, ragged, quirky, swingy sound that was very much our own.”
Not every experiment worked out, and that turned out to be a gift. “We tried to make a record from those songs, but the results never quite became what I’d heard in my head. Those recordings will probably never see the light of day, but the experience was an invaluable education. It taught me about recording. It taught me about arranging. Most importantly, it taught me what I wanted – and what I didn’t want, musically.”
After eight years, Trout Lily played its final show at Hamilton’s Supercrawl in 2025, and Krygsman took a hard look at the stage itself. “By then, I had begun seriously questioning whether I even wanted to perform live anymore. I’m a painfully shy, awkward person, which means performing live can be extremely stressful, and must involve Beta Blockers and vast amounts of alcohol. I started wondering why I was putting so much energy into something that I found so difficult.”
The words kept coming anyway. “But I was still writing. At first there was no album, no plan and certainly no grand artistic vision. There were pages and pages of blathering nonsense. I had been collecting little ideas and phrases in the notes app on my phone, and I started throwing them together, taking them apart, and following them wherever they seemed to want to go.”
“The mess began to take shape. Ideas became concepts. Concepts became verses. Verses developed choruses and sometimes even bridges.”
A common thread appeared. “And something interesting started happening. The songs weren’t all trying to say the same thing, but they began to reveal a common preoccupation: connection, and the difficulty of maintaining yourself within it. There is a tension running through them between wanting connection and wanting autonomy. Taken together, the songs became a strange little world.”
So, she rebuilt how she made music. “That realization also changed the way I wanted to make the record. I wanted to be able to structure the songs myself, rather than building them around a band. I wanted to establish the song structure based on my simple guitar and voice demos and then bring in other musicians when I needed things I couldn’t provide.”
“That meant the music was going to sound different. There would probably be a strong electronic component, alongside the live instruments – a considerable departure from the acoustic, quirky sound of Trout Lily.”
She found the right partner in producer Ashton Price. “I approached a local producer and explained (more or less) what I was trying to do; he was immediately supportive, and we began recording the first song in January 2026. The process has been slow and sometimes wonderfully strange. We started with basic electronic tracks and built the songs piece by piece, adding live instruments and vocals as we went along. Some songs came together quickly. Others took months.”
Some of the best parts started as hums. “I’ve only been writing songs for about ten years. My musical vocabulary is limited. I can often hear exactly what I want without knowing what a musician would call it. So there has been a lot of humming. A lot of mouth trumpets – some of which made their way into the final tracks. A fair amount of vocal percussion. Musicians became remarkably adept at creating beautiful tracks from the increasingly incomprehensible vocal imitations of the parts I imagined.”
Those musicians include Mark Volkov on fiddle, Troy Dowding on trumpet, Paul Burnip on clarinet and Mark Lalama on accordion, with Price handling production, programming, and guitar. Krygsman sings and plays guitar, mouth trumpet and kazoo.
Every song has its own story. “Little Spoon” is a prickly, hilarious anthem for the fiercely independent: “If I had to be a spoon, I’d be the big one / But honestly I’d rather be a shovel.” Krygsman explains, “So often as a musician it isn’t possible to just make music with another person. Other layers, other feelings inevitably develop. Which drives me crazy. I’m a loner and my writing process is solitary. I want my words to stay exactly as I’ve written them. I don’t want other input. I don’t want someone to make decisions for me. I don’t want anyone interpreting my lyrics as being meant for them alone. And I absolutely do not want to be anybody’s little spoon.”
“No” is the EP’s most powerful moment. “I’ve always had trouble saying no,” she says. “I fear criticism, and of course I am human – on some level at least, I want people to like me. This has resulted in some poor decisions, and some extremely painful experiences. This song puts it all out there and reclaims the word NO with certitude and strength. I love singing it.”
“Sid” is a love story with tentacles, starring “the Mata Hari Of Calamari” and “the Captain Kidd Of Squid.” In her words: “The sad story about a woman who falls in love with an Octopus and struggles to understand him. On his part, he is simply fascinated by the fact that she only has four limbs as compared to his eight, but it goes no deeper than that. Eventually the charm wears off, the Octopus falls in love with a snake, and he leaves her dangling.”
And Mama? “I love to create within a structure, a larger framework,” Krygsman says. “For this one I was brainstorming and organizing all the different ways we communicate with our hands, and the idioms and cultural ideas contained within these concepts. Slowly it became a story about fingers, and from there a character developed – Mama carries a bag of fingers with her everywhere, and the story of how she loses each one forms the backbone of the song.”
“Poking the Hive” rounds things out with a sly, swaggering breakup kiss off, buzzing with honeybee wordplay and Lalama’s accordion.
Krygsman’s creative life stretches well beyond music. Trained at the Ontario College of Art, she’s an acclaimed illustrator who works in ink, collage, acrylic and pixels, specializing in animals for children’s books. She wrote and illustrated ‘Esther and the Avocado Tree,’ and she has illustrated books by Robert Priest, including ‘Rosa Rose’ and ‘The Wolf is Back,’ along with Lynne Kittredge Fox’s ‘Jungle Valley Jamboree,’ ‘Owl on the Prowl,’ ‘ABC Groovy’ and ‘Watermelon Tummy,’ and cover art for Eileen Quinn’s Harlequin mysteries. She has staged solo shows across Hamilton, including her Dream Series, and won First Place Platinum for Best Local Artist in the Hamilton Spectator Readers’ Choice Awards. She came to guitar about 15 years ago and has always started her songs with words, loving wordplay, clever rhymes, and double entendres.
She sums up the EP best. “And finally, these songs are making their way out into the world. This record grew out of the end of a relationship, the collapse of a band, a failed recording project, and an unhealthy pile of words and ideas. It’s funny. It’s strange. It’s occasionally rude. It’s sometimes painful. It’s full of wordplay, ridiculous characters, and complicated feelings. And it is mine.”
“I started this process wondering whether I was finished with music. As it turns out, I just needed to find a way to make it on my own terms.”
Mama may have lost a finger or two along the way. Joan Krygsman, on the other hand, has found everything she needed, and on October 31 she’s handing the whole bag to the world.
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