Lindsay Ell comes home to Country Thunder stage with new record label and fresh outlook
The Canadian Country Music Award-winning guitar virtuoso and host of Canada's Got Talent performed a late afternoon set on the main stage at Country Thunder, which included a few from her new EP Fence Sitter, which comes out in October.
After the set, Ell posed for selfies with hundreds of fans who lined up patiently to say hi to the singer who grew up in Calgary, going to see concerts at the Saddledome.
At the end of her set, Ell said, 'Calgary is the best hometown ever!'
After spending 45 minutes meet-and-greeting, Ell picked up on that closing statement in an interview with CTV News.
Lindsay Ell
Calgarian Lindsay Ell won her first Canadian Country Music Award last year, winning Single of the Year for "Right on Time". Ell performed Saturday at the 2025 Country Thunder Festival in her hometown of Calgary, Alberta. (Photo: X@LindsayEll)
'Are you kidding me?' she said. 'I always feel so grateful when I get to play a show at home. This is the music community that raised me, and it feels like a full circle moment any time I can come back and play shows here and be able to give back.
'It's crazy to see how much the city has changed from all my trips (back home),' she added. 'I was just here with Shania (Twain) for Stampede, and yes, it's really great to be back.'
Fence Sitter gets its name from the emotional dilemma she finds herself in at this stage of her life.
'I don't know if I want to have kids of not,' she said. 'Some days, I wake up and I really do, and some days I wake up and I'm not sure if I do.
'I've thought about it ever since I was a little girl,' she added, 'and in my twenties, I thought about it more, and when I turned 30, it just was so loud!'
That inner conversation led Ell to pitch a song on that theme to her team of songwriters, which is where she discovered there's a Reddit page about that exact topic called Fence Sitter.
'It has 80,000 people,' she said. 'It inspired me so much I was like, we have to write this into the lyric!'
'I've always felt like (musical) projects are snapshots of where an artist is at any given time,' she said. 'I feel like it's (Fence Sitter) a really good summary of where I am at this moment in time.'
Magic
Musically and professionally, Ell is a state of evolving. She's hosting Canada's Got Talent on CTV for the fourth year and Fence Sitter is her first project for Universal Music, her new label.
One of the tunes on Fence Sitter is Magic, which features Ell in the bedroom she grew up in, where she wrote her first songs as a talented teenager who played guitar like an old blues man.
The song is hopeful and melancholy, about someone trying to get their mojo working again.
Ell said it's a kind of effort to peel away the self-consciousness that a decade and a half living in Nashville embeds into an artist's head.
'Magic truly is about how my brain just got so focused on trying to write a number one on the radio song that I lost focus about what music really means to me,' she said, 'and the sound I really wanna make and what I really want to be writing about.
'I'm trying to get back to the place that that feels very Lindsay -- and the music I used to make when I was a teenager, writing songs in my bedroom.'
Ell's summer was bracketed by a pair of Calgary appearances, including her Stampede appearance playing alongside Twain, who she grew up listening to and idolizing.
That brought the conversation around to what it's like to play guitar in the same old arena that she first came to as a fan, watching her musical heroes sing live.
'There's something about playing festivals in the summer in open air,' she said, about Country Thunder. 'They have their own kind of magic.
'But I'm always grateful when I get to play the Dome,' she added, 'because I saw so many shows there growing up -- and so to then be 180 degrees in that room, on the stage (playing), always feels like a brain warp.
'And they're building the new one,' she said, 'so who knows? Maybe that's the last time I'll play there.
'We'll see,' she added. 'Hopefully not. Man, I'm so glad I got to be there (performing) one last time.'
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