“To be brutally honest, I was forced to play the fiddle.”

Mary Frances Leahy is joking…sort of.

As one of seven offspring to have sprung from two famous fiddlers – Natalie MacMaster and Donnell Leahy – the 18-year-old Canadian musical phenom is in good humour, having just released her debut solo recording First Light.

“My dad says I was genetically forced to be a fiddler,” she laughs over the phone from her home in Ontario. “Growing up in the home that I did, it was always like ‘play your fiddle and eat your vegetables’. And, truthfully, I did not like to practice. In fact, I still don’t like to practice. But I must admit, my parents were right – it does make a big difference.”

While she has been fiddling around with the fiddle most of her life, Leahy admits that her love for the instrument only came about more recently.

“In my younger years, I did not want to make a career out of music. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I didn’t think that being a professional musician was in the cards for me. Thankfully, my parents never put any added pressure on me. Whatever I decided to do with my life was alright with them. They know, first-hand – and likely more than most people – the many challenges that come with being a full-time musician.”

Her perspective on performing changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It was weird, I don’t know – something just sort of clicked inside of me and things started falling into place. I was listening to a lot of Latin music and that inspired me to start writing. I wasn’t necessarily composing traditional Celtic music…don’t get me wrong – I was raised with that music, and I there will always be a special place in my heart for it – I just felt that it had already been said, and there was no motivation for me there. I felt like I had something new and different to give – something that was uniquely my own. That’s when it clicked.

Over the coming months, Leahy would sit at the piano for an hour each day until she had composed something…anything.

“It actually drove me nuts, because my mom would hide in the next room or at the top of the stairs with a recording device and tape everything I played. She always said, ‘You have to do something with all of this!’”

Around the same time, almost serendipitously, her parents built a recording studio in the home.

“All of a sudden, I had this musical playground right down the hall from my bedroom. Recording an album seemed very natural given the circumstances, and so it began.”

For First Light, Leahy enlisted multi-award winning Cuban Canadian Elmer Ferrer as co-producer, arranger, guitarist and digital programmer. Also on board for the sessions were Remi Arsenault (bass), Mark Kelso (drums), and León (percussion).

Leahy says that she savoured the opportunity to work with top-shelf talent.

“They always push you to be better than you thought you could be. Great musicians inspire the ear and direct your musicality in new ways.”

So far, response to the recording has been beyond her expectations.

“I’ll be honest here – I get very anxious about what other people think, and I was so scared to put this out there. I was actually expecting people not to like it. But then my brother’s teenage friends started coming up to me and telling me how super cool it was, and I’m like – ok, that’s great, because I didn’t expect you guys to go for this at all, but that’s amazing.”

Leahy is currently touring North America in support of First Light.

“I am just so grateful to my parents for believing in me from the start of this project. Without their support, I would not have had the courage or the patience to do it.

“But that’s their job as parents, right? And they are like that with my brothers and sisters also. The rest of the world might know them as famous fiddlers, but to me they’re just mom and dad.”

@fiddlemaryfrances