Colette Baron-Reid is a celebrity in the world of personal transformation, speaking before mega-crowds, publishing best-selling books and hosting her weekly podcast, Inside the Wooniverse. As an intuitive, she spent three decades sharing guidance to a legendary Little Black Book of A-list private clients (all hush-hush, no names, of course). But with the release of her latest album – her first in 22 years – she takes her own biggest leap of faith yet.
On July 17, the day of her 68th birthday, Baron-Reid is taking her own creative journey full-circle with the launch of My Dark Church, an album that takes a trip to the ’60s and ’70s with Celtic-flavoured songs that also nod to her heritage. Reached at her farm east of Toronto on the eve of the album’s launch, she tells me, “If you listen to the Slavic chorus choir, it is very, very similar to Celtic. I love the melancholy flavour of that kind of music.” It inspired her, she says, and feels like home to her.
Baron-Reid eschews the word “psychic” but loves the concept of “woo woo.” Back in the day, in the ’90s in Toronto, going to see Baron-Reid was a rite of passage for the media and fashion set I ran with. She blew my mind revealing what was going to happen to me, including my children and their names (which I forgot until years later). Even then, a session was a big splurge. Now she has closed her books on intuitive consults, thus ending the three-year wait list cited by the Hollywood Reporter story, “Why Psychics Are the New Must-Have Hollywood Advisors” back in 2013. (The article also revealed that Ron Howard and daughter Bryce Dallas Howard were clients at the time.)
Instead, today she offers her own Oracle card series (19 best-selling decks) on colettebaronreid.com, as well as various manifesting interactive seminars and educational classes such as “Messages from Spirit,” running in Toronto on July 23 with a Halifax date to come. One of her favourite phrases, she told me when I interviewed her circa 2013 on the release of a book she wrote about empathy overload and what it can do to your relationship with your body, “Don’t poo poo the woo woo,” meaning: Don’t dismiss the things you don’t immediately understand.
Music is a way for her to bring all the layers of her career together. She is also a visual artist and creator of her Oracle cards where the inspiration is channelled through divination. It all centres on faith, she says now, “which is a broad term, open to interpretation for anyone, something bigger than me.” Faith is at the heart of her new album, as is “a connection to the mother, Mother Earth, our mothers, the feminine.”
Baron-Reid was drawn to the music of her youth, with folk-forward sounds. She wrote the album in studio in just eight days alongside her collaborators, The Brothers Koren, Australian musicians now based in Ojai, California. This return to analog and vintage sounds comes at a fortuitous time as folk and alt-rock singer-songwriter sounds are in the fore this summer – from Tori Amos going back on tour, to the rediscovery of Kate Bush by a new generation, to Joni Mitchell’s late-career moment. Baron-Reid stayed true to her OG inspirations, Fleetwood Mac, CSNY, Loreena McKennitt.
Still, like all of us, she doubts herself. Her last album, Magdalene’s Garden (2001) had an alt-rock flavour. Then in her mid-40s, an executive told her she was “too old” to be a musician. We spoke back then as well, for a story I wrote for The Globe and Mail, now lost to the sands of time (newspapers did not yet archive articles in the early 2000s). I remember the conversation clearly, though, and witnessing her experience as she was right on the cusp of massive opportunities with Hay House, now owned by Penguin Random House, a platform devoted to mind-body-spirit transformation. She pivoted to that educational and empowerment role.
But the words “too old” from that executive clung to Baron-Reid even through all her best-sellers and crowds and successes in her intuitive career, which has also included meditation and chanting recordings. Letting those words go now to do this music is a victory, she says. “I really had to surrender to this whole thing.”
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It started with her parents – whom she really loved and admired but who made it clear they did not want their daughter, who went to Havergal College private school, to go into music. She was supposed to go to McGill University or University of Toronto and be a doctor or a lawyer.
Today she realizes that the music industry, the way it was back then, was tough, especially on young women. Baron-Reid is 40 years sober and says she knows staying in music and its pressures would have challenged that.
In March she wrote on her Substack, Notes From the Edge, which she launched 18 months ago that she had to confront a shark-toothed sea goddess to understand why she left – and why she needed to go back to – music. Baron-Reid has a hauntingly beautiful voice. During the process, she and her collaborators would sometimes joke around, calling her work “sad vampire music,” a playful take on the depth of emotions it evokes. Indeed, some of her YouTube meditation tapes channel the same magic timbre that brings both challenging thoughts and peace to your restless mind, all at the same time.
The sea monster represented her deepest fears: “I was afraid of music,” she wrote. “Or more specifically, I was afraid of what music might ask of me. Music was my first language.” A melody could express what she could not yet explain, as she puts it: “I finally said in a song what I could not say in words.”
The vision of the sea goddess, she concluded, was about her relationship with her inner artist. Beautiful, dangerous, caught inside a whale-bone cage, like the corsets Baron-Reid used to wear to try to fit into the image she thought the world wanted of her as a singer. The cage door was open, though, and the goddess could have left at any time – she was waiting, Baron-Reid concluded, for her to come back to her first love, music.
What freed her was the realization that, “I haven’t got it all figured out. The longer I do this, the less I know.” Humility is the ultimate connection, between all of us, and the universe.
