Canadian Musician November / December 2019 | Page 43

fort rooted in earnest and emotive jazz,
soul, and gospel sounds. This time, she
delves into the civil rights movement
of the 1960s and touches on specific
individuals and events that changed the
course of black history in the Americas
around that time.
The execution of the 14 tracks on
Stay Tuned! is as impressive as the proj-
ect’s overall ambition, and has earned a
heap of attention and accolades for the
Montreal-based musician – including a
coveted spot on the 10-album shortlist
for the 2019 Polaris Music Prize. It’s a
beautiful reminder that music needn’t
be heavy to be fiercely angry, or delicate
to be intensely moving – that music is a
language with many dialects all capable
of expressing the same things.
The third and final installment of
the trilogy will focus on more modern
and mainstreamed genres like disco,
funk, soul, and hip-hop and, correspond-
ingly, more universal and celebratory
lyrical themes.
Fils-Aimé explains that, once she’d
come up with the concept of the trilogy,
she essentially worked on the founda-
tional material for all three releases at
the same time. “I was writing things
based on the research I was doing and
the thought process behind it,” she
shares, “so the beginning was to go
through the whole concept, seeing how
our history and music came together,
and then I got to focus on each moment
in history and what it meant, and how
we could capture that history musically.”
For Stay Tuned! specifically, that
“we” refers to a tight-knit cast of col-
laborators that joined her and producer
Jacques Roy in the studio and, for the
most part, extended their roles to the
stage for the subsequent live shows. As
she explains, she leans on their talents
fairly extensively as she has no formal
training in music and is still relatively
new to composition and arrangement.
“The creation is me all alone, and I
create every track just with my voice,” be-
gins Fils-Aimé about the process. “Then,
the musicians take that and translate the
different parts for their instruments. I’m
lucky to be surrounded by musicians that
really take the time and care to transform
the music with me; they had to be very
flexible and open-minded compared to
what they’re used to.”
The idea was to hold nothing back
in the studio – to do whatever they
could to realize Fils-Aimé’s original
vision for the art – and then revisit the
material after the fact to tailor it to the
stage. After all, her performances can
take many different shapes, from a
stripped-down duo to a full stage.
“The album is complete freedom
to create anything you imagine without
boundaries,” she muses, which is espe-
cially crucial to her trilogy, considering
all that she was trying to capture and
relay.
“When it comes to the stage, that’s
a different type of freedom – the free-
dom to bring people in, but with some
restraints and limitations you wouldn’t
have on an album, so there’s more cre-
ativity and collaboration there because
you don’t have that total control; you
need to leave room for the unexpected.
They’re separate forms sharing the
same message and same views, but
with different tools.”
Fils-Aimé is known for approaching
her sets more as a continuous narrative
than a collection of individual songs,
and subsequently, there’s typically no
applause between them at her shows.
“I treat it more as a play in a way,” she
says, once again crediting her band for
wholly buying into the idea. “They take
their roles very seriously and worked
hard to capture the vibe and message I
want to put out.”
She admits that she felt inse-
cure when first sharing her output as
multi-layered vocal demos with such
gifted musicians and arrangers; how-
ever, not only were they well-received,
but they ended up keeping a lot of those
textural vocal parts in the album ver-
sions, ultimately establishing a unique
component of Fils-Aimé’s now-signature
and widely-celebrated sound.
That sound is also the product of a
myriad of influences and experiences,
and while much of the history that in-
forms the trilogy belongs to her brothers
and sisters south of the 49 th parallel,
Fils-Aimé still credits Canada and, spe-
cifically, Montreal as being instrumental
to its conception and completion.
“Montreal, to me, I compare it to a
really fertile ground where everything
is just shouting at you to create,” she
enthuses. “There’s music everywhere,
beautiful architecture… Street art really
inspired me a lot, too. It all reminded me
you’re free to express whatever you want
to express, and there’s a community out
there that wants to see and hear it.”
When speaking with her, it’s easy
to forget that Fils-Aimé only came into
her own as a songwriter in the last few
years; the way she so descriptively and
transcendently discusses music and art
in general belies that fact, and she’s only
growing more confident and creatively
potent as her work progresses.
“Owning who I am and accepting
what makes me different as a strength
instead of a weakness has been very
empowering,” she asserts. “The only
limits we have are our insecurities; it’s
so clichéd, but it’s really true – that we
can hold ourselves back because we’re
afraid of ourselves, or afraid of failing, or
even afraid of succeeding.
“But it’s not just about making
something perfect or beautiful,” adds
the unparalleled vocalist, songwriter,
and performer. “It’s about making some-
thing true.”
And as Stay Tuned! so perfectly
proves, it can even be about all of those
things at once.
Andrew King is the Editor-in-Chief
of Canadian Musician.
CANADIAN MUSICIAN 43