I SPOTLIGHT I
Twang Ambitions
BY GENE KOSOWAN
FOR SOMEONE WHO w rote a
song called “Strike 4,” St. Albert country songstress Hailey Benedict has a pretty enviable batting average. At 19, with four charted singles in her musical resume, she’s already been rounding the bases with a slew of local, provincial and national honours and enjoying a reputation as a crowd favorite in the live circuit.
Even during a pandemic, country artist Hailey Benedict pushes forward 28
T8Nmagazine.com
All of which makes it rather frustrating for the emerging recording artist to spend the beginning of 2022 stuck in the dugout while the rest of the entertainment industry remained sidelined during a stubborn pandemic. In January, a double-vaccinated Benedict found herself quarantined in her family’s basement when she tested positive for COVID-19 a day before she was slated to receive a booster shot. “It’s funny, because I’m not the type of person that goes out, so the one time I went out to record some stuff and it turns out my producer had it, so I ended up getting it,” said Benedict during a phone interview. “It’s crazy, you can try as much as you want to avoid it and you still get it.” It’s not the viral experience Benedict expected. When she was in her early teens, the singer registered more than five million hits on a YouTube video playing one of her own songs with a gobsmacked Keith Urban beaming in
the background. Now 19, Benedict’s been building her own audience with a cumulative 16,000 followers on her social media accounts and more than a hundred songs in her creative inventory. While in isolation, Benedict worked on more descants, stoking the starmaker machinery that so far yielded quite a few encouraging sparks. To date, she’s already won such titles as two Association of Country Music in Alberta awards, an Edmonton Music Awards credit, a Global Country Canada award, a St. Albert Mayor’s Arts award, and several other distinctions facilitated by radio stations and country festivals. She’s especially proud of her Global Women of Vision honour, which she received in 2017 and that enabled her to network with — and become inspired by — successful people in her gender. She calls herself a feminist in that she’s already witnessed glass ceilings in her chosen field and would like to rectify those discrepancies. “There’s disparity when you compete in country music or
