Veronica Raine is an indie folk singer-songwriter from Southern Alberta, Canada, known for emotionally honest writing and intimate, story-driven performances. Her music has picked up support from SiriusXM, CBC, and more than 80 radio stations around the world, and in 2026 she played the Winnipeg Folk Festival, Tongue on the Post, and East Town Get Down. For “Pauline” she joins forces with Christie J Simmons, a Calgary songwriter who makes elegant acoustic music with a poetic edge. Simmons’s training in classical flute, early music, and highland bagpipes gives her work an unexpected depth, heard on her albums Winnie’s Song and Learn You by Heart.
Pauline
“Pauline” is a character study with a hard ending. The young woman at its center drifts, almost without noticing, into a life where nothing good can grow, and she ends up behind bars. From there, the song watches choices and bad luck knot together with honesty and self-deception, as the months stretch into years. The image the two writers return to is a bird with its wings clipped. Pauline cannot fly, and she cannot sing. The question underneath it all is whether she is being crushed by the weight of denial or by the weight of the truth.
Raine and Simmons wrote, composed, and performed the song together, and it is a natural pairing of two writers who both favor plain, honest storytelling over easy comfort. The track runs just over three and a half minutes and sits where folk, singer-songwriter, and country meet. Mark Troyer produced and engineered the recording and plays on it too, with Mitch Jay adding another set of hands. What the song gets at is how the rougher side of society can pull in people who never set out to be there, whether through innocence or simply not paying attention, and how a person comes to understand that some paths have no way back.
Final Thoughts
What stands out about “Pauline” is its refusal to look away. Veronica Raine and Christie J Simmons give their character no rescue and no tidy lesson, just the slow realization that the past cannot be undone, and that restraint is what makes the song land. It is a sober, well-crafted piece of folk storytelling from two Alberta writers who clearly bring out the best in each other.
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