Meredith Moon isn’t someone living in the past. She’s a young woman. She comes from a musical family, but taught herself to play banjo when she was 21 by watching YouTube videos. Then she hit the road playing solo alongside a folk-punk band, tapping into a DIY network that enabled her to book her own tours: across North America, Central America and western Europe, including Croatia and the Czech Republic — many places that don’t often see a young female singer-songwriter playing Appalachian-style banjo. Bars, art spaces, house shows — it didn’t matter to Moon: “I booked everything through the travelling punks and the old-time scene—which are honestly quite similar.”

She put out two indie albums, one of which she was happy to bury, and the other she considers her proper debut: Forest Far Away, which came out in 2018. Constellations, her first for True North Records, was finished in late 2019—or so she thought. For obvious global reasons, she kept it on the shelf for a while, a time during which she decided to sub out two old songs for new ones, recorded with a rhythm section. One of them is “That Town,” about the northern Ontario town of Wawa, best known for its enormous statue of a Canada goose. “It’s the town that all travellers get stuck in,” says Moon. “When you’re hitchhiking, there’s nothing between White River and Sault Ste. Marie. It’s rough territory. When I first went through there, I was stuck there for four days. I was stuck there once during a big snowsquall, too. But there are worse places to be stuck. It’s a vortex — but a nice vortex.” Amidst the eight new originals on Constellations are two traditional tunes arranged by Moon: “Soldier’s Joy,” and “Needlecase Medley.”

With the release of Constellations, Moon is willing to do something she consciously avoided ever since she started writing songs: acknowledge her pedigree, the fact that her father’s name carries a lot of weight in musical history. Gordon Lightfoot is her dad.