Canadian Musician November / December 2019 | Page 42
DOMINIQUE FILS-AIMÉ
Looking Back to Blaze Forward
BY ANDREW KING
“I
believe everyone that
wants to create, can cre-
ate,” asserts Dominique
Fils-Aimé – an idea that
has come to define her
artistic identity and sub-
sequent career trajectory.
The quote comes from a discus-
sion with Canadian Musician about
her formative years as a songwriter
which, as might be surprising to those
familiar with her magnificent 2019
sophomore LP, Stay Tuned!, weren’t all
that long ago.
The era-blurring and genre-bend-
ing artist first came to prominence on
the third season of La Voix – Quebec’s
highly-touted version of internation-
42 CANADIAN MUSICIAN
al TV franchise The Voice – in early
2015. At the time the show’s produc-
ers came knocking, she was working
as a psychologist and making music
on the side with no aspirations of
becoming a professional musician. Of
course, that would soon change.
“Going so far in the contest
caught me off-guard and I thought,
‘OK, people really can relate to me,”
she told the Montreal Gazette earlier
this year. “You don’t need training;
you just need to mean it for people
to feel you.”
She dropped a four-song EP –
her first collection of original music
– later in 2015 and, in just the few
years since, has established herself
as a one-of-a-kind fixture of Cana-
da’s cultural landscape.
A big part of that recognition
stems from the ambitious concept
behind her output since that debut
EP. Fils-Aimé’s first three full-length
collections comprise a trilogy that
explores and celebrates the history of
Afro-American music and culture.
Nameless, released in February
2018, is the first of the three, and
encompasses weighty themes of
identity, struggle, and resilience
with a minimalist musical backdrop
based on work songs and early
iterations of the blues.
A year later, she dropped Stay
Tuned!, a more sonically-expansive ef-