First Play Live: Skye Wallace, (self-titled)
Watch dynamic performances from Skye Wallace's 4th full-length album
For her fourth studio album, Skye Wallace drew inspiration from stories that came to her attention while on two different artist residencies — one in Dawson City, Yukon, and the other in Norris Point, N.L.
The stories are as diverse as the geography that separates both places: in "Suffering For You," for example, Wallace writes about a group of 19 people that survived on an ice flow in Yukon for six months in the 1700s; in "Death of Me," she writes about a nurse who died during childbirth at the Bonne Bay Cottage Hospital in Newfoundland, examining just how aware the nurse must have been of the issues that led to her ultimate death.
Often, the musical explorations of those themes are more stereotypically connected to the tradition of a folk singer-songwriter — a sound the Scarborough-born, now Toronto-based artist reflected in her first two albums. Eventually, however, Wallace noticed there was something inside her that she felt wasn't able to be expressed in that genre.
"I think over the years, while I was doing folk I didn't want to sound pretty anymore ... I started trying to integrate an overdrive on my acoustic guitar ... and people kept telling me, 'That doesn't sound pretty ... you should sound pretty,' and I was just like, 'Well, I guess I'm going full rock then!" Wallace told CBC Music during her First Play Live session.
With this latest self-titled album, Wallace seems to be completely at ease with her sound and storytelling, incorporating the folk tradition of vulnerability with the passion and power of rock and punk. "There's a certain amount of aggression that I like to tap into when I'm performing as well as telling the stories in the songs," she said. "I think it really lends itself to a lot of these stories."
Watch as Wallace digs in vocally, energetically and emotionally to her performances of songs from her new, self-titled album.
