Anne Murray is having a moment. She has had many great moments in her illustrious career—but she certainly didn’t plan on having one at the age of 80. After all, she’s been retired and out of the game for a long time.
“Good heavens, sometimes after 17 years, you think, what was it I did?” she says from her hometown, Springhill, Nova Scotia. She hasn’t done a concert or recorded any music since putting the supposed final word on her career with her 2009 autobiography, All of Me.
It turns out that wasn’t all she had to give.
Her return began in March when she appeared at this year’s JUNO Awards to accept the Lifetime Achievement Award. She thrilled the crowd by wearing a rhinestone-covered Team Canada hockey jersey, perfectly in step with the patriotic wave rising across the country. She made more headlines when she donated the jersey to a charity auction, raising $16,500 for Halifax’s IWK Health Centre.
Then, the biggest surprise came on her 80th birthday—June 20—when it was announced that there would be a brand-new Anne Murray album, Here You Are, arriving on September 5.
None of this was by Murray’s design. She’s been happily holed up on the East Coast since she retired, enjoying the views and calm lifestyle of “Canada’s Ocean Playground.” What she didn’t account for was just how devoted her fans would continue to be.
For the past 36 years, Murray has welcomed people to the Anne Murray Centre, a non-profit museum in her hometown. It was opened to boost tourism in small-town Springhill and, since 1989, has welcomed over half a million visitors through its doors. Each year, Murray does something very special for her biggest fans. A summer weekend is set aside, and ticket holders get to share lunch with Murray, have photos taken, take part in group chats, go to tribute shows, and whatever else is on the agenda. They limit the attendance to around 125 people, who pay several hundred dollars, with all the proceeds going to upkeep of the Centre.
These fans are passionate about Anne Murray. Barbara Osborn is from Hampstead, Connecticut, and comes to the special weekend every year. She says it’s an opportunity for the fans to get to know the real Anne.
“Anne is a true-blue person. She’s natural, she’s real, she’s honest. She has a quick wit. She has a gorgeous voice. She’s the whole package. She stayed true to her roots, and is still the same person she’s always been. She’s a wonderful woman, beautiful inside and out.
“Anne has great fans. They adore her for the person she is, and you’ll find a little bit of that in each one of us. And as Anne stands in the spotlight, her light shines on us. Everyone here has a very special story of how Anne has influenced their lives, inspired them, encouraged them, comforted them when they are down, and lifted us up. A true icon.”
Another hard-core fan is Lynn Holt from Las Vegas. He heard “Snowbird” when he was 11 years old, started collecting her records, and became what he calls a completist, finding a copy of every known Murray record. He also saw her in concert over 100 times.
Holt took it one big step further. When he heard that Murray had donated her personal archives to the University of Toronto in 2017, he decided he needed to take a look. So he booked an appointment, flew to Toronto, and started nosing through her collection, when something caught his eye.
“There was one cassette that was called “in the can” from Anne’s personal archive,” says Holt. “They didn’t have a hi-fi when I was there, they gave me one of those old single-speaker tape recorders, like a Realistic, and that’s what I had to hear these on the first time, AM radio quality.“
One after another, songs played that Holt, the completist, had never heard before. For an Anne Murray fan, it was like finding the Holy Grail.
“It was sort of like the greatest hits package of the unreleased stuff, all the songs left off albums from 1982 to 1985, her imperial era. There were maybe 12 songs on that, just on a cassette tape.”
Thrilled with his discovery, Holt figured other fans would like a chance to hear the songs as well. He sent an email to the Anne Murray Centre, suggesting playing the tape at a listening party during the annual get-together. The programming had already been decided for that year, and then COVID hit, and the idea got buried.
Enter Charlie Rhindress. Another big Anne Murray fan, Rhindress is a theatre director, playwright, and author from Amherst, Nova Scotia. He’s also the Outreach Coordinator for the Anne Murray Centre.
“In 2024, we were celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Anne Murray Centre, and we were looking for something special to do. I said, ‘Whatever happened to those songs that Lynn Holt mentioned?’ And it turned out no one actually had them, so I said, ‘Why don’t we see if we can track them down and do a listening party as a fundraiser for the Centre?’ At the time, I thought it would be just a few of us in a room, maybe Lynn would come, and we’d sit and listen to the songs. I didn’t think Anne would be interested, because Anne, when she retired, she walked away from music. I didn’t think she’d go for it. We were having a Zoom chat with a few of us, including Anne, to talk about events for the summer, and she was up for it. She said, ‘Sure, I’ll go to that.’”
Murray had an idea of what the songs were.
“When you record, vinyl albums would hold 10, 11 songs, but most times you would overcut, and you had more songs to choose from,” she says. “If you didn’t choose those songs, they would go into what we would call the can, and they belonged to the record company. I thought, those songs, we didn’t want them in the first place, so why would we want them now? Well, guess what? I was quite honestly gobsmacked at what I heard.”
Holt got to witness his favourite artist rediscover these long-forgotten songs.
“There were these moments at the listening party where … you could see that she was pleased. What a thrill, what a joy to see an artist of that calibre admiring their own talent from a new perspective, a perspective that you helped reveal. It was a really poignant moment, and I’ll never forget it.”
Holt also found out at the party that there were other unreleased songs to discover. Murray’s old label, Capitol Records, had been sold years before to Universal Music. Universal had donated all the old Capitol archives to the University of Calgary. So, Holt set off on another mission.
“I booked a flight to Calgary, and that’s where the real motherlode was located.”
“Well, there are all the masters,” marvels Murray. “The University of Calgary started to digitize all of these recordings. It turns out there were something like 50 songs. We said, well let’s have a listen to some of them. All of this happened because of Lynn Holt, and Charlie. Charlie became a liaison with the University of Calgary, giving a push to get some of these songs digitized.”
Holt was able to find 44 tracks, spanning from the 1970s through the 1990s. By now, Murray’s current record company, Universal, was interested in releasing an album. So, Murray started to pick her favourites. Rhindress discovered he had a new job.
“As an Anne Murray fan, this was one of the highlights of my life and career, both. To find these songs that I knew Anne hadn’t heard in 40 years, and I’m texting them to her, and she’s going, ‘Oh, that’s a good song,’ or ‘Nah, I don’t care for that,’ it was an incredible experience. I felt so privileged.”
After a lifetime in theatre, Rhindress was all of a sudden in the music big leagues.
“I’ve never worked on an album, I know nothing about the music industry,” he laughs. “But there was a point where there were emails going back and forth, and it was Anne Murray, Bob Rock [the album producer], Bruce Allen [Murray’s manager], and Charlie Reindress. And I’m like, what am I doing here? How is my name in this email thread?”
During a talk at this year’s Anne Murray Centre event, Anne got to tell Rhindress just how important he was to the album.
“Charlie, without you, I could not have done this,” Murray told him. “We were on the computer almost every day for months. It was a labour of love for you and became a labour of love for me, also.”
Rhindress even got to name the album.
“She wrote to me one night and asked if I had any ideas. I said, ‘What about Here You Are, because I think it’s one of the strongest tracks on the album. It also sounds like, Here You Are, you’re offering something, offering fans something they’ve never heard before.’ She immediately said she liked it, and it became the title.”
Across the Anne Murray fan world, the seemingly impossible news of a new album was greeted with joy. Mary Rose Chapman comes from Perth, Australia every year for the big Anne Murray Centre event—literally halfway across the world.
“I actually sat down one year and worked it out,” says Chapman. “If I moved nine kilometres eastward, that would be the furthest point from Springhill, Nova Scotia, in the world.”
She remembers exactly when she heard about the new album.
“When I read it, I was grateful that the patio door was open, because I’m sure half the neighbourhood heard me cheering. Or at least screaming, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ If the patio door had been closed, I might have blown a window or two out. It was a big yell.”
Donna Oteri is a first-timer at this year’s event in Springhill, coming from Las Vegas, and she ordered the album as soon as it was announced.
“It’s going to be extraordinary, I’m so glad,” she says. “I listen to her every day. I tell Alexa to put her music on. I never get tired of it; it invigorates me, and I love her voice.”
No one is more surprised that she’s come out of retirement than Murray herself.
“I settled into it, and I was fine, and I never dreamed this would happen. And it’s been a real shot in the arm. I was really happy at how good the songs were. You forget how good you were. You really do, because as time goes on, you’re not so good. The songs come from a 20-year period, and that was the peak of my career.”
Mostly, she’s grateful that fans like Holt, Rhindress, and the rest who join her at the Anne Murray Centre were the driving force behind the new album.
“It’s almost euphoric in a way, that fans are still interested, that they show up here. This brought it all back, what I did, and I realized it was quite a career.”
