Aysanabee on Sandy Lake, Residential School Healing & Becoming Indigenous Music's Next Global Voice
From a trailer with no electricity in rural Ontario to the Juno Awards stage, Aysanabee joins Shayla Oulette Stonechild on the Matriarch Movement podcast.
Matriarch Movement Podcast — Season 6: Indigenous Voices of This Generation
Multi-instrumentalist, producer, and singer-songwriter Aysanabee joins Shayla Oulette Stonechild on the Matriarch Movement podcast for a conversation that moves from a trailer with no electricity in rural Ontario to the Juno Awards stage.
Aysanabee opens up about growing up between Sandy Lake First Nation and a series of small northern communities, teaching himself guitar in the forest as a kid, and working in remote mining camps from age 12 - including two near-death experiences with a bear, a wolf pack, and falling through frozen ice, a moment that pushed him to finally commit to music.
He shares the story behind his Polaris-shortlisted, Juno Award–winning debut album - a project born from daily pandemic phone calls with his grandfather, a residential school survivor, that turned into recorded interviews and ultimately an album that helped his grandfather find peace before he passed. Aysanabee also talks about the $40 application fee that led to a record deal over a socially-distanced "Zoom dinner," playing 184 shows in a single year, the emotional weight of representing a national reckoning around residential schools, and his recent trip to Taiwan, where he discovered strikingly similar songs, dances, and reclamation journeys among Indigenous communities on the other side of the world.
The conversation closes with his hopes for the future of Indigenous music including his dream of seeing a global Indigenous pop star and a preview of what's next as he heads into the mountains to write his follow-up to his latest release, Edge of the Earth.
https://www.tiktok.com/@aysanabee
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