New Brunswick singer-songwriter Shirley Eikhard wrote hit song ‘Something to Talk About’

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Singer-songwriter Shirley Eikhard was just 12 years old when she first performed in public. It happened in 1968 at a jamboree in Cobourg, Ont., with her country and western parents on stage with her. She sang Gordon Lightfoot’s Early Morning Rain and Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe.

“I was terrified,” she told The Globe and Mail in 1972. “But I found I liked the appreciation of the audience.”

She never got over the stage fright. The adoration lasted her whole career as well.

Ms. Eikhard, a shy but agreeable performer and a Grammy-winning songwriter, died on Dec. 15, at Headwaters Health Care Centre in Orangeville, Ont., owing to complications from cancer. She had recently celebrated her 67th birthday.

Her final album, 2021′s On My Way to You, was a melodic response to a grim medical diagnosis. Songs were both resigned (My Final Chapter) and optimistic (Anything is Possible).

The New Brunswick native will be remembered for her versatile musicianship and an effortless alto voice so soothing as to be medicinal. She was a hard-working songwriter who produced hummable and thoughtful material recorded by herself and by Cher, Anne Murray, Kim Carnes, Rita Coolidge, Emmylou Harris, the Pointer Sisters and Chet Atkins. Her calling card was Something to Talk About, a song about secret love and small-town parochialism famously recorded by Bonnie Raitt.

The 1991 hit skyrocketed Ms. Raitt’s career and bolstered Ms. Eikhard’s status and bank account too. In a career of peaks and valleys, Something to Talk About was her highest plateau. The song also represented the obstacles and happenstance nature of a music industry that often let Ms. Eikhard down and left her frustrated.

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She had first pitched the bluesy Something to Talk About in the mid 1980s to Ms. Murray, the Snowbird superstar who had a Canadian hit with Ms. Eikhard’s country-favoured It Takes Time in 1971. “I had a demo of Something to Talk About in my car for six months,” Ms. Murray told The Globe. “I listened to it, and I knew it was going to be a hit.”

Ms. Murray wanted to record it, but the three producers she was working with weren’t enamoured with the tune. Though the resulting 1986 album was named Something to Talk About, Ms. Eikhard’s composition of that name was not on it. “I was very disappointed because the song was kept on hold for five months and then dropped at the last moment,” Ms. Eikhard would later say.

The song was then shopped to other artists. Finally it was dug out of box of tapes – after sitting there for years – by Ms. Raitt.

Released as a single from Ms. Raitt’s 1991 album Luck of the Draw, the song charted on multiple radio formats, peaking at No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Ms. Murray’s tingly feelings about the song’s commercial possibilities were validated. “The first time I heard Bonnie’s version was in an Eaton’s store,” she said.

As Ms. Eikhard owned the lion’s share of the publishing rights, Something to Talk About was a life-altering jackpot for her.

Ms. Eikhard recorded 18 full-length albums of her own, covering folk, pop, light rock, jazz and country – she won Juno Awards for Best Country Female Artist in 1973 and ‘74. She had a modest domestic hit with Sylvia Tyson’s Smiling Wine in 1972 and her version of Say You Love Me by Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie received airplay four years later.

She was self-taught on guitar, piano, bass, drums, percussion, chromatic harmonica, saxophone, banjo and mandolin.

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In the early 1990s, Ms. Eikhard composed two scores for Toronto playwright George F. Walker. One of them, Escape from Happiness, won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for sound design. “She was wonderful to work with, and lovely in every way you could imagine,” Mr. Walker told The Globe.

Ms. Eikhard didn’t have the best luck with managers – including her father – and she took a long break from recording beginning in 1977. “I’ve had managers over the years who said very hurtful things about my image,” she said. “I ended up becoming a caricature of whatever they wanted me to be.”

Other issues included an allergy to cigarette smoke that limited which venues she could play prior to widespread smoking bans. Her legendary stage fright – “more like stage terror,” according to festival booker Richard Flohil – was exacerbated when she was stalked for years by a delusional man. “That spooked her so badly,” said Ms. Tyson, a friend and songwriting partner.

Offstage, Ms. Eikhard was a gentle, natural person whose wide blue eyes were permanently set to high beam. “There are certain people who glow in the dark,” Ms. Tyson said.

For many years the musician lived off the beaten path in picturesque Mono, Ont. She loved Christmas trees – she would put up six every year – and cut lawns on her trusted Cub Cadet mower. She took in feral kittens, favoured Starbucks coffee and jogged to dance music. Long-time friend Deborah Duggan described her as “a loveably eccentric pioneer woman” who was indomitable, thankful and self-sufficient.

The love of her life was Lola (Catherine) Osborne, who died in 2021.

Ms. Eikhard wrote her first song when she was 11; at 12, she was singing about divorce. A guitar instrumental of hers, Pickin’ My Way, was recorded by Chet Atkins when she was 15. She wrote It Takes Time before she had attended her first high school dance. A line such as “You’re never really caged in, but you’re never really free” was representative of her introspection and emotional candidness.

“She was an old soul,” Ms. Murray said.

Because the precocious teen could not play venues which served alcohol, she gravitated to coffee houses but was often diverted to more unusual places, including an equine event in Edmonton that did not go so well. “All the horse lovers went for hot dogs while I was on,” Ms. Eikhard told The Globe at age 16.

In a world of dog and pony shows, the nascent entertainer sought something simple and real. “I just want to sing songs for the people,” she said back then. “I would like to treat it as an art, but I guess that’s wishful thinking.”

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Shirley (Rose) Eikhard was born in Sackville, N.B., on Nov. 7, 1955. Her mother was June Eikhard (née Cameron), dubbed Canada’s First Lady of the Fiddle with her group the Tantramar Ramblers. Her father was bass player Cecil (Arnold) Eikhard.

The family moved to Oshawa, Ont., when she was eight. A child with a solitary nature, she fancied being a commercial artist, maybe an astronomer. But the pull of music was invincible. “I just had this gift,” she told The Globe in 1995. “I had a musical sense.”

While singing at a party in Prince Edward Island at age 14, her unusual abilities were spotted, resulting in a gig on CBC’s Singalong Jubilee and an introduction to Ms. Murray, who first gained fame from appearing on the Halifax-based television show herself. “We were awed by her talent,” Ms. Murray said.

After Ms. Murray released her version of It Takes Time, Ms. Eikhard signed a recording contract with Capitol Records and scored a songwriting deal with the label’s in-house publishing company, Beechwood. It was a whirlwind development for a teenager, who after dropping out of school felt lonely and isolated in an adult’s world.

“I wasn’t growing up dating like normal people would, learning all those social graces,” she told The Globe in 1995. “It was a very awkward time in my life. I didn’t have any friends of my own age, no one to talk to. Just a lot of demands.”

Billed as the “next Anne Murray,” Ms. Eikhard’s recording career progressed modestly in comparison to the international success enjoyed by her fellow Maritimer. Her first five LPs sold less than 30,000 copies combined. Needing cash, she sold her home. “By the time I got into my 20s I realized this is all I know how to do,” she later recalled. ‘’It was kind of scary.’’

Plagued by throat problems and anxiety in front of crowds, she didn’t enjoy performing. At age 30, she left Canada for Nashville, where she devoted herself exclusively to songwriting. On her own and fuelled by a daily pot of coffee, she wrote Something to Talk About in 20 minutes.

Some five years after Ms. Murray’s producer’s rejected the song, the struggling songwriter listened to a message on her answering machine. It was Ms. Raitt, playing a demo version of Something to Talk About, which she adored and wanted to record.

“I had received a cassette from Shirley with some great songs on it and stashed it away along with scores of other ones,” Ms. Raitt said recently. “Right when I needed it, I found the cassette, played the song and knew it was a catchy, smart and fresh way of looking at romance – playful and something I really hadn’t done before.”

Ms. Eikhard never recorded Something to Talk About herself but did perform it as a duet more than once. In the mid 1990s, she sang it on television with Rita McNeill, the likeable Nova Scotian who hosted Rita and Friends. “Two less likely, more informal stars it would be impossible to find,” Mr. Flohil said.

In 2002, Ms. Raitt brought Ms. Eikhard on stage at Toronto’s Massey Hall. Though it was Ms. Raitt who said, “Who would have thought this song would change my life like that?”, the question could just have easily been posed by the woman who wrote it. But, as it turned out, after the unrehearsed duet of Something to Talk About, Ms. Eikhard had nothing to say. She nervously bowed a few times before leaving the spotlight without a word. A sick cat of hers needed tending to back home in the country.

Next year, Sylvia Tyson plans to record something she wrote with Ms. Eikhard. “It makes me cry whenever I hear it now,” Ms. Tyson told The Globe. The song is called Generous Heart.