Crystal Shawanda releases her new album, ‘Homesick Indian Blues,’ out now through New Sun Records, produced by her husband, Dewayne Strobel. The 10-song set is led by “Come Unto Me,” a cover of The Mavericks classic that doubles as a tribute to the band’s late frontman, Raul Malo, whose early support helped launch Shawanda’s career.
Shawanda describes the album as being about identity and self-reclamation. “Homesick Indian Blues is about finding your way home,” she says. “Not necessarily to a physical place, but home to who you really are. No matter where anyone is from, we all change parts of ourselves just trying to fit in, and we lose ourselves along the way. These songs represent pivotal moments in my life, and the trajectory of my journey that led me here. I hope the listeners can feel that. The title of the album is about identity, and opening up that dialogue about controlling our own narrative. It’s about unbecoming who the world told us to be, and sometimes that means going back to where we started.”
The story behind the song reaches back to Shawanda’s earliest days in Nashville, when she and her band played for tips in the back room upstairs at Tootsies on Broadway, a room reserved at the time for acts the industry had given up on. Performing a mix of pre 1975 country, blues and rock and roll, the group built a devoted following among the songwriters, artists and producers who came to watch, Malo among them. “We never bothered Raul when he came in,” Shawanda recalls. “We could see he was trying to lay low.”
That changed the night of her RCA Records showcase, when Shawanda looked up and saw Malo in the crowd. His presence meant everything to a young artist who admired him precisely because he never fit the country music mould. “That support, that interest, it inspired me and encouraged me,” she says, calling it one of the breadcrumbs that told her to keep going. When The Mavericks reunited years later with Eddie Perez joining the lineup, Shawanda and Strobel began dreaming of one day collaborating with the band whose records had shaped them both.
That dream took on new urgency when the couple began working up “Come Unto Me” just before Malo’s passing in December 2025. Strobel encouraged Shawanda to carry the song forward as a tribute and invited Perez to be part of the recording. Perez accepted, contributing electric and acoustic guitars and backing vocals, and personally walked Shawanda through his parts on the track. “I was like a little kid, so nervous and excited,” she says of the session, describing Perez sharing stories of his years alongside Malo.
Malo himself once explained that the song drew inspiration from the film King Kong, the idea that even a giant can be rendered vulnerable by love. Shawanda has embraced that same spirit in her version, delivering the material with the commanding, full throated vocal power that has defined her blues catalogue for over a decade, set against the Tex Mex textures of a Flamingo Pink Stratocaster that Strobel acquired directly from Perez. “My husband and I have lived these words,” Shawanda says, “and I think that really shines through in this track.”
Born and raised in Wiikwemkoong First Nation on Manitoulin Island, Shawanda is Ojibwe Potawatomi and signed with RCA Nashville in her early twenties, releasing ‘Dawn of a New Day’ in 2008, which topped the Canadian Country Album chart and stands as the highest charting album by a full blooded Canadian Indigenous country artist in the SoundScan era. The following year she became the first Indigenous woman to win the Canadian Country Music Award for Female Artist of the Year, before shifting fully into the blues with ‘The Whole World’s Got the Blues’ in 2014.
That pivot produced a JUNO Award for Best Blues Album with 2020’s ‘Church House Blues,’ and in 2022, her album ‘Midnight Blues’ made Shawanda the first Indigenous woman to debut in the Top 10 of the Billboard Blues chart. Her most recent album before this one, ‘Sing Pretty Blues,’ topped the Indigenous Music Countdown in 2025 and earned JUNO and Canadian Blues Music Award nominations. Across her career, Shawanda has won two JUNO Awards from nine nominations, a Canadian Blues Music Award from two nominations and a Maple Blues Award from six nominations, while drawing more than six million streams and building a reputation that draws comparisons to Tina Turner and Janis Joplin. In 2012, she founded New Sun Records, the first female and Indigenous owned record label in Canada, which she continues to run while mentoring emerging Indigenous artists.
‘Homesick Indian Blues’ was produced, engineered and mastered by Dewayne Strobel, with additional engineering by Brandon Henegar and Nioshi Jackson and assistant engineering by Zhaawande Strobel, and mixed by Strobel, Henegar and Jackson. Strobel plays guitar and bass throughout, aside from electric and acoustic guitars by Eddie Perez on “Come Unto Me” and bass by Stan Miczek and drums by Al “Baby” Webster on track six. Nioshi Jackson plays drums elsewhere on the record, with Peter Keys on piano and organ, Stephen Hanner on harmonica and Chris West on horns. Background vocals come from Quisha Wint, Eddie Perez, Zhaawande Strobel, Crystal Shawanda, Lauren Anderson, Rissi Palmer and Laurie Webb.
‘Homesick Indian Blues’ track listing:
Homesick Indian Blues
Cut Through The Wind
I’ll Play The Blues For You
Come Unto Me
Breaking Us In Pieces
I Think I Love You Too Much
You Win Again
I’m On Your Way Home
Never Ever
The Whole World’s Got The Blues
Tour dates:
January 16, 2027, Italian Cultural Centre, Thunder Bay, ON
January 18, 2027, Dryden Regional Training and Cultural Centre, Dryden, ON
January 21, 2027, Townshend Theatre, Fort Frances, ON
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