The Acadian music explosion

When Lisa LeBlanc's most recent album, Chiac Disco, was shortlisted for the 2022 Polaris Music Prize, she was blown away. Not only because it's her second Polaris nod — her 2016 English album, Why You Wanna Leave, Runaway Queen?, was shortlisted in 2017 — but because it embraced her Acadian heritage.

"It's chiac … it's from where I'm from," says the singer-songwriter, pointing out that the album is entirely in the Acadian French accent specific to her southern New Brunswick upbringing. While her previous English album is still close to her heart, LeBlanc's 2022 album release was different: made during a pandemic, when LeBlanc moved from her base in Montreal back to New Brunswick for two years, Chiac Disco stamped LeBlanc's Acadian culture on her sleeve. After years of writer's block, and after producing an album for Acadian legend and mentor Édith Butler just the year before, Chiac Disco felt like freedom — and it felt like home.  

As descendents of French settlers in what is now considered New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and P.E.I., Acadians have fought for space and recognition since the Expulsion in 1755, when the British started forcibly removing more than 15,000 Acadians from their homes. Centuries later, Acadian music scenes are thriving where they originally began, but what's changed over the last few decades is what Acadian music both sounds and looks like. Originally rooted in rural country and bluegrass and leaning heavily on traditional instruments such as fiddles, Acadian music today is no longer just one thing — instead, the one thing that connects the musicians is their Acadianness. 

It's also undeniably experiencing a boom across language barriers. LeBlanc's release is only the second Acadian album to hit the Polaris short list — 12 years after Nova Scotia's Radio Radio became the first with Belmundo Regal — but other Acadian names aren't far behind. P'tit Belliveau saw both his 2020 debut album and this year's followup album hit the Polaris long list, and the tongue-in-cheek lyricist from Clare, N.S., has seen his popularity explode online. New Brunswick's Les Hay Babies just celebrated 10 years as a trio, and say they are seeing more love and demand for Acadian bands than they ever have before. 

"This summer, a lot of our festivals that we played at or headlined were part of an Acadie night, which is new," says Julie Aubé of Les Hay Babies. "And it's funny to think about, it's like the equivalent of going to a festival in Ontario and being part of a Maritimer's night, you know what I mean? I don't think that really happens. So it's cool that right now Acadie is such a scene."

Lisa LeBlanc's newest album? Disco-inspired. Radio Radio's catalogue? Hip hop. P'tit Belliveau's music? Electronic that has morphed into Jonah Guimond's various tastes, including hip hop and pop. Les Hay Babies? Indie folk, rock and, most recently, a '60s-inspired concept album that could easily fit into the Laurel Canyon canon.

What they have in common: whether explicit or implicit, they are all proudly Acadian — and their mainstream fanbases are growing.

Linguistic (in)security

Natalie Robichaud, president of the Fédération culturelle acadienne de la Nouvelle-Écosse (FéCANE) board and head of the Société acadienne de Clare, thinks there's one major factor that has pushed Acadian music forward: linguistic security.

"We've been told our whole life that our French is not the good French, c'est pas le bon français, le bon français c'est celui du Québec, ou de la France, right?" says Robichaud. "So when you were a kid, I remember hearing this like, 'Oh parle le bon français,' which automatically makes your French not bon, not good, right? So there's been a lot of work in the last 10 years in the cultural sector networks to say, 'You know what, just speak the way you speak or sing the way you sing.'" 

It's a thread that runs through many Acadian artists' experiences. In an interview with Exclaim last year, former Radio Radio member Arthur Comeau detailed how Quebec media treated the Acadian hip-hop group as a "novelty act" only a handful of years before Les Hay Babies formed: "They wanted to frame us as a comedy act," he told Exclaim. "Yeah, I'm a funny guy, but I'm not the comic relief. We were rappers! For us, being Acadian rappers was empowering. For them it was like, 'Alright, send in the sideshow.'"

Les Hay Babies' Aubé, who joined the trio a few years after Radio Radio, remembers growing up in Memramcook, N.B., where French teachers would hear the mix of French and English with her Acadian accent and tell her, "That's not French."

The fact that I ended up in New Brunswick and I still speak French, I think that's a miracle and it's a gift. And I have to do all that I can to preserve it and keep it alive.- Julie Aubé, Les Hay Babies

"That creates this insecurity that made me and my generation feel stupid, invalid. It made us feel like, 'OK, we're not real francophones. I guess we're just this bastardized version of French,'" she says.

Thankfully for Aubé, and many others, there are folks trying to counter that stigma. When she was in high school, Aubé attended Accros de la chanson, a type of battle of the bands for Acadian students in New Brunswick, which is where she met her soon-to-be Les Hay Babies bandmates Katrine Noël and Vivianne Roy. Accros is run by the Fédération des jeunes francophones du Nouveau-Brunswick, which organizes activities in French schools in the province to bring Acadian students together. Aubé both performed and met mentors through that programming, which she credits with helping her accept and celebrate her language and history.

"For me, it's an honour to still speak French because my ancestors have lived in the Maritimes for 400 years, and only my parents were the first generation to go to school in French.… And the fact that I ended up in New Brunswick and I still speak French, I think that's a miracle and it's a gift. And I have to do all that I can to preserve it and keep it alive."For Robichaud, who's been working to support Acadian artists in Nova Scotia for more than a decade, the change in attitude during her career has been groundbreaking.

"If I was a French professor, I could listen to a P'tit Belliveau song [and] I'd put red marks all over it, you know? Because there's not the proper conjugation, or there's a lot of English words, but we're over that now. And 10, 15 years ago, people didn't feel comfortable to sing [in Acadian French]….  I think that's what has been the game changer for us, in Nova Scotia, anyway. " 

Jonah Guimond, a.k.a. P'tit Belliveau, says it's a balance of acadjonne — his regional Acadian accent from southwestern Nova Scotia — and a bit more English than expected that makes his music work for a wider fanbase. He also feels that his Acadianness is incidental to his music. As a kid who grew up in Clare, N.S., and mentored at the Tide School, which is run by Radio Radio's Comeau, the internet is the reason Guimond is able to get his music out there: it lets him continue to live and produce in his hometown, and share his music worldwide, no matter who knows about his Acadian background. 

"It's very complex, the way that people feel about their own Frenchness and everything," says Guimond. "And there's a lot of judgment within the French world towards English and everything like this, and that's a whole bag of worms. I don't know much about that. Like, I'm not any kind of a scholar. I'm not asking those questions very much to myself. I'm just making music a lot, and it just comes out the way it does."

'A very modern Acadian musical landscape'

Another reason Acadian music is finding its way into the mainstream is for the simple reason of genre: "We're finally getting out of traditional music," says Robichaud.

"As much as I love traditional music, young people just don't identify with it," she explains. "So to have sounds that P'tit Belliveau's doing — because he started with pure electronic music when he was a teenager — to have that sound that kids can relate to, it's definitely different. I did not have that. We had Roch Voisine and, like, Céline Dion. I was not interested in listening to any French music because it just didn't appeal to me." 

It's a shift that resonates with Sami Landri, an Acadian drag performer from Dieppe, N.B. As someone who's always felt proudly Acadian, Landri says Acadian pop culture was generally presented to them as "very heteronormative, very straight, very country, very rural." They remember LeBlanc and Les Hay Babies coming onto the scene in the early 2010s and starting to lay the groundwork for a different Acadian sound. Now, based in Montreal, Landri can attend a sold-out P'tit Belliveau show and see Quebec francophones fully embrace an Acadian show. It's all helped open space for Landri to imagine and create an Acadian future that speaks to them. 

It helps me see that I am Acadian and I can be queer as f--k.- Sami Landri

"Doing drag and doing it in a very queer way has helped me see my Acadianness, and just Acadianness in general through a queer lens. It helps me see that I am Acadian and I can be queer as f--k, and I don't have to stay in the past… I can be extremely modern or futuristic, while still sharing my Acadianness."

Landri's performances started as lip syncs in drag shows a few years ago, when they wanted to explore the idea of an Acadian drag queen. After their "imperfect version of a drag queen" blew up on TiKTok a year ago — hitting more than 330,000 followers today — they started working on a live music show, translating pop hits into chiac. One of their go-to numbers is Britney Spears' "Gimme More," cheekily translated to "As-tu des cigarettes?," which was part of their most recent performance at Acadie Rock this month.  

Editor's note: strong language warning.

"I just really like exploring and putting out there a product that is a hot, sexy, fun and very queer and very modern Acadian musical landscape," they say.

It also helps them unravel the layers of what being Acadian means. "In general, we are very stuck on the fact that we are victims of colonization. But … we tend to forget that we also were colonizers," they explain. "So I feel like being queer and seeing my Acadianness through a queer lens has helped me also be critical of my Acadianness."

Editor's note: strong language warning.

'Super lacking in industry professionals'

While today's momentum is helpful for the current generation, Aubé knows that there's more to do to keep things moving for future artists. New Brunswick recognizes French as an official language, alongside English, and has significant programming for youth — two things Nova Scotia doesn't have — but Aubé says more people are needed to help support and promote Acadian artists. 

"Acadians are super lacking in industry professionals," says Aubé. "There is not a lot of infrastructure in New Brunswick compared to other provinces, and that's our main problem. There's tons of artists and there's not enough people to help them get where they need to go. We're managed and on a label in Quebec [Simone] because I can count on one hand the amount of managers there are in New Brunswick, and that's not enough."

Robichaud says it's a numbers problem in Nova Scotia, too, where there's even less industry support than New Brunswick.

"There's not a lot of us, you know, if you compare it to boots on the ground, like an army, there's not a lot of people doing the work … that's where I see a very weak link going forward," she says.

Ultimately, though, Robichaud just wants to see Acadian artists onstage. It's something that happens visibly on National Acadian Day every Aug. 15, with a big show that just wrapped up at Dennis Point wharf in Pubnico, N.S., and will happen in larger numbers when the Congrès mondial acadien, an international summit of Acadian culture that takes place every five years, returns to Argyle and Clare, N.S., in 2024 for the first time in 20 years. But she wants to see artists onstage at every possible turn in between.

"I remember Jonah [Guimond, a.k.a. P'tit Belliveau] as a kid in high school, he was 14, [he] didn't like French music, didn't want to sing in French, thought it was stupid. Look at him now," says Robichaud. "But there was a lot of work that went in, you know, funding for training and workshops and afterschool programs. He's a direct result of Heritage Canada funding."

For Guimond, the Acadian artists before him walked so that he could run. As P'tit Belliveau, Guimond just wants to write music that makes him — and others — happy.

"In the past, singing like me would have been a statement," says Guimond. "Because back in the day, all Acadian musicians pretty much sang in the standardized French. And it took people like Lisa LeBlanc and Radio Radio to bust that open. They got a lot of hate for it. Maybe because of them doing that already, I don't even think about it and I just do it."