Photo Credit to Leeor Wild
As a kid, Canadian Inuk artist Elisapie hiked up a mountain beside her adoptive father without saying a word. The pair quietly walked up a hill, surrounded by lush scenery in northwest Canada, the land of the midnight sun. As they climbed closer to the clouds, the sound of a buzzing crowd grew louder. The father and daughter arrived at a gathering in a clearing that resembled a baseball field. Children played in the grass as a band started their set in the hillside amphitheater. Elisapie’s uncle took the stage, and the quiet girl found her own voice as she sang along with the familiar music.
Elisapie, now an adult with kids of her own, described this memory to me almost as if she was in a trance: “It’s summer, the mountains are green, and I remember just being like, ‘This is magic. This is magical.’”
This concert was the catalyst for her pursuit of music, and she went on to perform with the band, called Sugluk, throughout her youth. She still recalled how divine the moment seemed to her younger, sensitive self.
“It’s memories like that that I want to recreate,” she said. She played her own outdoor concert just last year and insisted on a stage where her songs could be the soundtrack to a gorgeous mountain scenery.
Elisapie was raised in the small town of Salluit, Nunavik, in Québec until she was 19, when she left to live in Montréal. There, she formed a collaboration with composer Alain Auger, and the duo released a demo project under the name Taima. The pair’s self-titled album won a Juno Award in 2005, and Elisapie delved into her solo career shortly after.
Elisapie’s sound now is a mountain in and of itself. Her soft vocals paired with powerful strings and pounding percussion make a forceful beat that sneaks under your skin with each note plucked. Her 2018 album, “The Ballad of the Runaway Girl,” reached inside listeners and pulled them into the forest with hypnotic rhythms and chanting choruses that harmonize into catharsis.
The album — which was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in 2019 — embodies the process of finding relief after suffering. Elisapie recognized the emotional release of the record at her NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, saying: “I wrote a song; it was the most painful song — yet it was the most freeing song — I have yet to write.”
Part English, part Inuktitut, part French, part animal, part child, viscerally saturated, and entirely alive — her first album chronicled her family trauma and the things she was carrying without knowing that she had to let go of, as she described during an interview on France 24. If she explored the pain of this wound in her 2018 album, this year’s record is healing the wound itself.
This fall, Elisapie is releasing a cover album entirely in the Indigenous language of Inuktitut, titled “Inuktitut.” She chose 10 rock songs from famed artists like Blondie, Metallica, Pink Floyd, Cyndi Lauper, Fleetwood Mac and more, and translated them into Inuktitut, adding her own gentle touch by stripping down the songs to a folksy display of tenderness. The covers released so far include “Taimangalimaaq (Time After Time),” based on “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper; “Uummati Attanarsimat (Heart of Glass),” based on “Heart of Glass” by Blondie; and “Isumagijunnaitaungituq (The Unforgiven),” based on “The Unforgiven” by Metallica. The songs sound refreshingly modern while still creating space for traditional Inuk influences. The renditions feel emotional and deeply personal,qualities Elisapie felt were necessary to the stories that had to be told through this collection.
The idea for “Inuktitut” evolved during the pandemic, when Elisapie took up running to escape the house. She had been jogging and listening to ABBA when memories started to play in her mind, leaving her overwhelmed with nostalgia and pain. She sobbed as she ran through the neighborhood and arrived back home drenched in tears and gasping for air: “Who cries listening to ABBA? Who does that?” She laughed now.
“It was beyond music. It just opened a place where I felt so much of the sadness I had left behind or buried. And it was coming back, so I became addicted to listening to songs and figuring out (these feelings),” she explained.
The next day, she listened to another song from childhood on her daily run. She began to process the nuances of aged memory. Elisapie reached out to her family members and found that the stories she remembered were ones that also haunted her cousins. In her Instagram post announcing this album, she described this as an “archaeological mental process: finding songs associated with memories filled with emotions and people from my past.” She says the collection is a “playlist like an emotional autobiography.” She listened and jogged and sang and wrote and remembered — and pressed the wound until she formed a scar.
The 10 songs appearing on the album helped form her scar — “the red line” or the thread in her quilted history, as she called it.
The vulnerable curation could have stayed private — and Elisapie thought about it. “That was the original idea because I so needed to revisit these songs in order to feel good, to feel better; this was during the pandemic, so this was naturally where my spirit was going.”
One of the more emotional songs on the album that has yet to be released is “Qaisimialaurittuq (Wish You Were Here)” (based on “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd). She has her doubts about being able to perform the Pink Floyd cover without bursting into tears. “It’s a personal, emotional song about mourning, about trying to find the tears that don’t want to come out but you know they have to come out.” Elisapie described the iconic ballad as a “friend that says, ‘Come here, you can cry.’
“It’s a way for me to bring the light, but I still get very emotional singing it and listening to it. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to do it live because it takes me to a place where it was very common to mourn,” she said.
On June 21, National Indigenous Peoples Day, Elisapie released her cover of Metallica’s “The Unforgiven,” titled “Isumagijunnaitaungituq (The Unforgiven).” While the original rock song is famously angsty, Elisapie’s rendition approaches that darkness with banjo and throat singing — bringing a powerful femininity to the brokenness of the anthem.
As Elisapie relived memories through songs, she realized that she wanted to share the light and comfort that the familiar music brought her. “For me, it definitely became bigger because I realized I can reach a lot more people who can get emotional, who can maybe even want to heal certain aspects of their own childhood,” she said. “It’s all about wanting to share — that need is so strong for me. It’s really what drives me because I think by reaching out further, I can maybe better heal myself.”
Noah Georgeson, the Los Angeles producer who mixed the upcoming album, echoed the same sentiment of communal healing when he said yes to the album. He told Elisapie, “It’s weird how with the songs, we hear it in your language, through your storytelling, but we also hear our childhood. It takes us somewhere personal.”
Looking ahead to touring once the album comes out, Elisapie said she wants to create “a celebration of our lives” as she prepares for the shows — which she predicts to be a colorful, joyful moment of honesty.
“I really want to create an environment where people are safe and want to go on a journey with us,” she said of the months on the road.
“I really want to create magic. I think I owe it to these big songs and these memories.”
Elisapie’s album comes out September 15, and you can listen to “Taimangalimaaq (Time After Time),” “Uummati Attanarsimat (Heart of Glass)” and “Isumagijunnaitaungituq (The Unforgiven)” on streaming platforms now.