Maybe people have found a way around the barricades or across the borders. Perhaps they’ve caught the last train home. But chances are, if they were unlucky enough to be traveling when the world stopped in winter 2020, they were out of luck. They had to shelter in place — and, most likely, by themselves — until conditions improved.

Orit Shimoni was one of the thousands upon thousands caught between countries and immobilized by cruel fate. The Canadian folk and acoustic blues singer-songwriter found herself in Manitoba at the beginning of the pandemic, unable to get where she needed to be. Her latest single can apply to anybody in transit, waiting for an opportunity to leave one place for a better and more familiar one, but this song is no metaphor. In “Winnipeg,” she captures the frustrations, hopes, and confusion of a particular time in human history — one that wasn’t so long ago, and that haunts us all still.

Prohibited from the touring life to which she’d become accustomed, Shimoni did what she does best. She documented her experience in tight, emotional, unforgettable melody and verse. Candid reflections on vexed circumstances: that’s Orit Shimoni’s specialty. She writes and sings with disarming frankness, and she can spin a story with the grace and conversational ease of a poet. “Winnipeg” is beautifully decorated with fiddle, banjo, and percussion, but at its heart, this is a recording as intimate as isolation itself — a chronicle of one woman and her acoustic guitar, desperate to break the freeze and resume life as she knew it.

It’s been an eventful one. Ever since the release of Cinematic Way, her richly detailed 2006 debut, Shimoni has been on the road, sharing her voice and her tales to an ever-widening circle of devoted fans. The Calgary Herald called her “one of the nation’s most alluring vocalists,” and she’s backed that up with album after album of stunning songs, gorgeous performances, and imaginative arrangements. In the “Winnipeg” clip (which she directed herself), she’s on her own, though: lost in her thoughts in an old house where the atmosphere itself seems to possess an oppressive weight. It’s a beautiful building, and Shimoni makes sure to capture its soft light and its architectural detail. She’s not stuck anywhere awful. But no matter how comfortable the surroundings, a place you can’t leave is no place at all for a touring artist — or anybody else.

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