Canadian Thanksgiving 2023 is one holiday Noeline Hofmann will never forget. In between sips of “breakfast beers,” sitting with her family at home in Bow Island, Alberta, on that October day, the songwriter received this life-changing text: “Zach Bryan just mentioned you in his story!”
“I was like, ‘What? This has to be a fake account,’” Hofmann recalls. “In that moment, I knew everything was going to change. My phone was going crazy with notifications, and my followers doubled every time I refreshed my feed. Never in a million years did I expect anything like that to happen.”
Despite what sounds like another social media overnight success story, the reality is that well before the Grammy-winning American country superstar shared a snippet of Hofmann’s song “Purple Gas” to his followers, she’d been playing honky-tonks and trying to make it, as she says, “the good old-fashioned way.
“That’s something I initially struggled with,” she says. “I didn’t want to be just another TikTok sensation. I’ve since come to peace with it… I know I’ve been working hard, and earned every opportunity I’ve been lucky to get.”
Select the image to play the YouTube video of the Noeline Hofmann song “Purple Gas”
The irony? Until posting “Purple Gas,” the 20-year-old had little social media presence. Uploading that video was an attempt to get more active. And what surprises her even more, looking back, is the fact she wrote this song – which has now surpassed 20 million streams on Spotify alone, and that Zach Bryan included on his most recent album, The Great American Bar Scene, the day before posting.
Words & Music catches up with Hofmann enjoying some rare down time at home in Alberta’s Southern Badlands. The singer-songwriter is still coming down from the high honour of closing the Edmonton Folk Festival singing Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds,” and taking the stage following a set by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant. This was just one of a series of enviable summer gigs that also included playing Toronto’s storied Massey Hall, opening for Charley Crockett.
Long before performing on these big stages, or learning guitar, Hofmann was writing words in a notebook. “I can’t remember a time when writing wasn’t a part of me, or the biggest part of me,” says Hofmann. “I took piano lessons as a kid, and really got into creative writing during junior high. Then I turned to poetry. When I picked up a guitar, I just naturally transformed these poems into songs.”
Like many artists, Hofmann credits a former music teacher for her career path. This educator encouraged the musician (then 13 years old) to enter a Songwriter’s Night in Medicine Hat – the nearest big city to Bow River, Alberta. “The show aired on Saturday night on our local TV station and a friend and I both performed,” she recalls. “That was the first time I played an original song live, and I immediately caught the itch!”
Growing up in the prairies, Hofmann listened to a lot of classic country on the radio, but she was also drawn to other genres, like rock. As a teenager, one of her biggest influences — and an artist who still holds a special place in her heart — is Joni Mitchell. When it comes to venues, the local treasure of Bow Island (about 300 km Southeast of Calgary) is Blues at the Bow. Hofmann’s best friend’s dad is the Club’s president, so as kids they received special listening privileges in exchange for manual labor.
Ranch Reflections and Dyed Fuel
“If we mopped the floor or did some other chores around the club, we were allowed to listen to the soundcheck of all the bands that played there,” she recalls. “Since it was an 18 + venue, we couldn’t watch the show, but as a 10-year-old kid, listening to these bands get in tune, that was the first time I remember thinking to myself, ‘One day I’m going to play at this club!’”
A true prairie cowgirl, Hofmann writes about what she knows: her rural Alberta upbringing, and stories of the lives of ranchers and farmers. Purple gas refers to dyed fuel that offers a tax break for farmers and ranchers, who use it for agricultural purposes. The songwriter wanted to use this phrase in a song for a long time, but it was only during a formative experience at 18, working on a cattle ranch in Western Manitoba, when the imagery for this hit song coalesced.
“I wrote that song about a year after I left that job,” says Hofmann. “I was reflecting a lot, thinking about my boss, the things we went through together, and what I experienced on that ranch, and its lifestyle. My boss and I had been building this new fence together, and thinking about that I just started writing. The first lines that came were, ‘I am not the kind of man to blame the dealer on a losing hand.’”
Select the image to play the YouTube video of the Zach Bryan and Noeline Hofmann version of Hofmann’s song “Purple Gas”
Following the success of “Purple Gas,” Hofmann signed with La Honda Records (home of Colter Wall, The Local Honeys, and Bryce Lewis). A second single, “Lightning in July (Prairie Fire),” was released on Aug. 9, 2024; it was written specifically to have a classic country barn-burner to add to her set list, before hitting the road with Charley Crockett. “I needed to write my own kind of fight song,” Hofmann explains. “That song is very playful… it’s my cheeky self-introduction.”
The next single is due before this Summer’s end, and an EP is in the works for release sometime in the Fall of 2024. As the conversation closes, Hofmann reflects on the past year, and shares some advice she learned while working with Zach Bryan.
“I recorded ‘Purple Gas’ live with Zach,” she says. “There were two microphones in the room, and we sang it no more than five times before he was, like, ‘We’ve got it!’ My tendency is to be a perfectionist, but working with an artist like Zach taught me a lot about letting go, and appreciating the beauty in what’s raw and real.
“I’m really excited about how the new songs will resonate with audiences,” says Hofmann. “I’m in it for the long run, and don’t plan on going anywhere.”