A Survivor Tree Takes to the Road: Tony Turner Brings His Music to UU Communities This Spring

Some songs find their people. For folk singer Tony Turner, Circle of Song — his anthem of unity now published in the beloved Rise Again folk songbook — has been quietly weaving its way through Unitarian Universalist congregations across Canada for years. “I’m not really sure why most Unitarians across Canada know Circle of Song,” Turner admits with characteristic warmth, “but they do.”  It’s a special gift to a songwriter, when a song finds its own way in the world”.  

This May, Turner is hitting the road. Loading up his camper van, he’s embarking on a cross-country tour that will take him through UU congregations from coast to coast, bringing songs from his new album Survivor Tree to the communities that have long carried his music.

A songwriter shaped by community

Turner’s roots in the Ottawa folk scene run deep. He credits the songwriting group Ottawa Writers’ Bloc and the legendary Rasputin’s Folk Café with shaping him as an artist. “I developed my songwriting skills by paying attention to the work of Canadian songwriters and especially the nurturing environment of the rich Ottawa folk music scene,” he says.

Now based in Nanaimo, B.C., Turner is himself a member of a UU fellowship there, which makes this tour feel less like a booking strategy and more like a homecoming multiplied. A recent visit to Toronto, where he played a Sunday service at Don Heights and a coffeehouse at The Neighbourhood UU congregation the night before, planted the seed. “It generated the idea: why don’t I arrange to play for more Unitarians? These folks know me and appreciate the songs and themes I bring to concerts and services”

The Harperman moment

Many UUs know Turner not just through Circle of Song but through one of Canadian folk music’s more remarkable recent chapters. In 2015, while working as a federal government scientist at Environment Canada studying migratory birds, Turner performed a cheeky protest song called Harperman, a singalong send-up of then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, with a choir that included many Raging Grannies, filmed right inside the Ottawa Unitarian congregation. When the government suspended him for it, the story broke nationally, the song exploded, and Unitarians across the country rallied behind him.

“A lot of Unitarians were very upset that I was suspended for writing a song,” Turner recalls. “It all worked out very well in the end, but in some ways, it was the participation Unitarians that gave the song added energy that helped increase the song’s appeal.” Harperman went on to earn Turner a Spirit of Folk award from Folk Alliance International.

The album: survival, with a sense of humour

Survivor Tree, released in June 2025, is Turner’s fourth full-length album and perhaps his most personal. Dedicated to his wife Sharon Reeves, a social activist and Library and Archives Canada professional who died of cancer in 2021, the album is, in many ways, Turner’s own reckoning with loss and renewal.

The title says it: a single tree surviving a catastrophic event can give hope to humanity. Turner himself is something of that tree.

The album moves through heartbreak and hope, the historical and the hyper-personal: Buffalo Bone mourns the slaughter of the buffalo from a settler’s son’s perspective; Me and the Mountain reflects on nature and living in the present; Lift You Up has the warmth of a campfire singalong. And because Turner wouldn’t be Turner without it, there’s also Bob Loblaw Blahs (complete with a Michael Bublé shoutout and big band horns) and Stuff, an affectionate poke at our collective inability to stop accumulating things.

“The more weighty real-life themes in my songs are countered by a healthy dose of humour,” Turner says, “which is always a good tonic for getting through any situation.”

Coming to a fellowship near you

For UU communities, a Turner concert is a rare gift: a songwriter whose values, social justice, environmental conscience, communal singing, and the irreverent wit that makes hard truths bearable, map naturally onto the tradition. His songs, he says, “fit many social justice themes, as well as the personal songs reflect our shared humanity.”

Tony Turner Cross-Canada Unitarian Tour, Spring 2026. Circle of Song may have found its people a long time ago. This spring, its author is coming to find them in person.

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