It’s fitting that Ora Cogan’s newest album, Hard Hearted Woman, would come out on Friday the 13th. Nanaimo-based, Salt Spring Island born Cogan has always been attuned to BC’s “super natural” side. Her gothic-tinged approach to roots is drawn from landscapes of mist and mysticism, places where beauty and wildness are one and the same.

From the beginning, music has been as natural a part of Cogan’s surroundings as the waters around Salt Spring. Her father a photojournalist and her mother a musician, Cogan’s childhood home doubled as a recording studio for the island’s artists and eccentrics. She began writing her own songs in her teens, and released her first album in 2007. But it was 2010’s The Quarry that set her on her current musical path, tapping into the darker, more psychedelic strains she’s explored ever since.

Hard Hearted Woman is a refinement and culmination of that sound — but hard-hearted it is not. It is resilient and confident, but also tender and open, an ecosystem of old-growth emotions in a world at risk of clear-cutting. And Cogan’s voice is the wind in the woods, an invitation to remember a world where the forest and fairy tale coexist.

- Peter Hemminger