Linda MacLeod has spent a lifetime making music, whether anyone was watching or not, and with her new single “I Tried to Get Through,” the 75-year-old Cape Breton-born, Halifax-based singer-songwriter is proving that a voice this determined never really goes quiet. The song arrives as the first taste of her forthcoming album, ‘The Well Known Unknown,’ due later this year, and its title could not be more fitting for an artist who has spent six decades earning every inch of her career the hard way.
MacLeod’s story starts almost as soon as she could talk. Raised on Cape Breton Island as the fourth oldest of ten children in a deeply musical family, she sang her first solo at five years old, when nuns brought her from classroom to classroom to perform, until a school principal put her on the PA system so the entire building could hear her. From there, the momentum never really stopped. In 1967, a fourth-place finish in a CJCB radio contest led to regional television appearances in Halifax, a coast-to-coast broadcast, and performances at the opening of the Miner’s Museum in Glace Bay and the Centennial train that crossed the country that same year. Along the way, she met and shared stages with Gordon Lightfoot, Kenny Tobias, Anne Murray, Murray McLachlan, and Valdy, a run of encounters most young performers only dream about.
For more than twenty years, MacLeod was a fixture of the Sydney music scene, performing with the groups Load of Wood and Load of Hay, writing jingles, and even composing a theme for the film ‘The Bay Boy,’ a song that ultimately went unused but hinted at a bigger break that always seemed just out of reach. In 1996, she moved to Halifax and connected with Kevin McMichael of Cutting Crew, who produced an EP with her in 1998. Years earlier, in 1983, she had already recorded with symphony musicians on a Donnie Palmer produced track, “Daryl’s Lullaby,” a song that found strong regional airplay in Sydney the first time around, even if the industry did not always make room for it the second time.
Life, as it does, had other plans in the years that followed. As a single parent, MacLeod kept music close but let it take a back seat while she built a career running a healthcare agency in Halifax, a role she still holds today. But the pull never fully let go. She auditioned for Canada’s Got Talent, unafraid to put herself forward even when the outcome did not go her way, and in August 2023, she was invited into the Dreamcatcher’s Song Circle and Songwriter’s Workshop, sharing space with Rodney Crowell, Peter Asher, John Paul White, Bill Haynes, and Gretchen Peters. That experience reignited something, and MacLeod has been writing and recording ever since.
“I Tried to Get Through” grew out of one of those conversations that stays with you. MacLeod and her longtime collaborator Rosemary Wall had been talking about a couple named Mary Theresa and Martin, who had lost their daughter Jody after a long illness. Mary Theresa had once dialed her daughter’s number out of habit, only to hear her voicemail still waiting on the other end, a moment both beautiful and devastating. It reminded MacLeod and Wall of something achingly universal: the instinct to reach for someone who is gone, the way grief can knock you off your feet all over again in an ordinary moment. Out of that shared understanding, the two wrote a song that speaks directly to anyone who has ever kept reaching for someone they’ve lost.
Still very much in the game, as she puts it herself, MacLeod is a reminder that talent does not come with an expiration date. She has spent a lifetime showing up, whether it was a packed television broadcast in 1967 or a quiet writing session decades later, and “I Try to Get Through” is proof that her voice, and her story, are only getting started for audiences across the rest of the country who are just now getting the chance to hear her.