These were the biggest Canadian music headlines of the 2010s
From Arcade Fire's Grammy to the Célinaissance, here are the moments that marked the decade
Welcome to the end of the decade. Has there been a bigger one for Canadian music?
The past 10 years have had their fill of important moments, from chart-breaking successes to all-star comebacks, from the rise of newcomers to the departure of legends. To cap off the 2010s, let's take a look back at the biggest Canadian music stories of the decade.
2010: Drake kicks off a decade of No. 1 hits and records
Drake's debut studio album, Thank me Later, marked the first of eight No. 1 albums he had this decade — and topping the charts is just one of the many incredible feats the Toronto star achieved in that time. He reached the pinnacle of his power with 2018's Scorpion, where the rapper caught up with Michael Jackson to become the second solo male artist in the Billboard Hot 100 history to accumulate 30 top 10 hits, and he broke two decades-long Billboard records held by the Beatles to become the most-streamed artist of the decade. From beginning to end, Drake dominated the 2010s.
2011: Canadians win big at the Grammys
From Arcade Fire's surprise (and, to some, confusing) album of the year win to Alessia Cara defending her best new artist win against toxic Twitter feedback, it's been a whirlwind decade for Canadians at the Grammys. Other notable artists who took home an award this decade include Toronto R&B singer Daniel Caesar, Nova Scotian soprano Barbara Hannigan, singer Michael Bublé and rapper Drake, who famously did a shot out of his first trophy.
2011: Justin Bieber throws his weight behind rising star Carly Rae Jepsen
After solidifying himself as a pop force, Justin Bieber helped sign B.C. songwriter Carly Rae Jepsen after hearing her song "Call me Maybe" on the radio in Canada. "He's never jumped out and promoted an artist like this before," Bieber's manager and School Boy Records head, Scooter Braun, told Rolling Stone in 2012. Bieber's first big co-sign led to the mega-success of "Call me Maybe," launching Jepsen into the pop sphere as an artist who became one of the genre's most important figures of the decade.
2011: The Weeknd makes his big debut
Scarborough R&B singer the Weeknd was a mystery when he first surfaced in late 2010. There were no photos of Abel Tesfaye, just a handful of tracks that impressed, among others, Drake, who gave the songs a boost on his OctobersVeryOwn blog. With buzz hitting a fever pitch, the Weeknd made his debut a year later, emerging as a star alongside, and later separate from, Drake.
2012: The Sheepdogs make Rolling Stone history
In 2011, Saskatoon rockers the Sheepdogs beat out 15 other emerging artists as part of Rolling Stone's "Choose the Cover" contest, becoming the first unsigned band to grace the cover of the legendary music magazine. After five years of touring their self-released music through North American cities and racking up thousands of dollars in debt, all it took was their demo tape entry in the Rolling Stone contest to nab the classic rockers the coveted cover — and two platinum records.
2012: Idle No More galvanizes a new era of protest music from Indigenous artists
The grassroots movement Idle No More was founded in December 2012 by Sylvia McAdam, Sheelah McLean, Nina Wilson and Jessica Gordon, with a focus on Indigenous rights and a respect for treaties. There were protests and transportation blocks, and former Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence went on a hunger strike. Indigenous musicians and non-Indigenous allies showed their support immediately, in person and in song, beginning with Idle No More: Songs for Life Vol. 1, which was released just a month later in January 2013. The record featured Derek Miller's "7 Lifetimes," a track inspired by Chief Spence, as well as tracks from A Tribe Called Red, Digging Roots, Whitehorse, John K. Samson and more.
2013: Godspeed You! Black Emperor responds to Polaris Music Prize win
Many winners of the Polaris Music Prize have used the platform to promote important messages, but only one has ever aimed its message back at the prize itself: 2013 victors Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The Montreal band wasn't in Toronto to accept the prize, but it did address Polaris in an open letter the day after the gala, criticizing the existence of an awards show "during a time of austerity and normalized decline." The band ultimately accepted the $30,000 prize and used it to set up a program for Quebec prisoners to access musical instruments. In 2015, the band members asked jurors to not consider or vote for their followup, Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress.
2013: Shawn Mendes blows up on Vine
Justin Bieber proved that YouTube virality could be parlayed into mainstream success in the late 2000s, paving the way a few years later for Pickering, Ont., native Shawn Mendes to do the same on the now-defunct Vine. Mendes racked up millions of views on his six-second covers of songs by Bieber, Ed Sheeran and Adele. A year after soaring to the top of the Vine ranks, he signed to Island Records and kickstarted his career with "Life of the Party," the first of many hit singles.
2014: The North takes centre stage
Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq released her third album, Animism, in May 2014, and five months later won the Polaris Music Prize, signalling the spark of a massive and vitally important shift that's changed the industry for the better. That same year, Iqaluit-based band the Jerry Cans released their second album, Aakuluk, which would also serve as the name of their label in 2016. Aakuluk Music is Nunavut's first ever record label, and is home to numerous local artists including Northern Haze, Aasiva, Riit and the Trade-Offs.
2015: Avril Lavigne reveals Lyme disease diagnosis, stages comeback
In 2015, Avril Lavigne revealed that she had been diagnosed with Lyme disease, leaving her bedridden at home in Ontario and thinking she "was dying" for five months. Once back on her feet, Lavigne released "Fly," a charity single written for the 2015 Special Olympics World Summer Games (with her then husband Chad Kroeger of Nickelback) and began work on what would be her sixth studio album — and first in six years. Head Above Water was released in February 2019, featured a cameo from Nicki Minaj and reached No. 5 and 13 on the Canadian and U.S. album charts, respectively. All that said, conspiracy theorists are still convinced Lavigne has died and been replaced with a clone.
2015: Neil Young releases his Pono player
In 2015, Neil Young launched his high-resolution online music store and portable player called Pono — which means "proper" in Hawaiian — after years of conceptualization, only to see it shutter fewer than two years later. Launched right around the onset of the music streaming boom, Young blamed record labels for the failed launch of the small, triangular players that would hold up to 2,000 high-fidelity music files. "The record labels killed it," he told the Los Angeles Times. "They killed it by insisting on charging two to three times as much for the high-res files as for MP3s. Why would anybody pay three times as much?"
2015: Canadian music festivals feel the crunch of an unstable decade
Summer 2015 saw two mega festivals move into Ontario: Bestival (Toronto) and Wayhome (Oro-Medonte), boasting headliners like Frank Ocean, Solange and Florence & the Machine and drawing big crowds to their Coachella-like atmospheres. They only lasted two and three years, respectively, but their run marked some of the most difficult years in an unstable decade for Canadian festivals, with headliner prices sometimes jumping up by 50 per cent — "if not double," according to James Boyle, executive director of the Halifax Pop Explosion — in an industry that is constantly competing for limited resources and dealing with increasingly unpredictable weather.
The latter half of the 2010s bore the consequences of that: Wayhome and Bestival disappeared, Toronto's TURF didn't return for 2017 and Field Trip went on hiatus in 2019. B.C.'s Pemberton Music Festival folded two months before its 2017 edition (and 10th year), and Vancouver Island lost two festivals in 2019: Rifflandia and Rock the Shores. Earlier this year, we looked at what was causing Canadian festivals to fail, and how some have been able to persevere: "It's a battlefield": how Canadian music festivals have survived an unstable decade.
2016: The Tragically Hip sets out on final tour after Gord Downie's cancer diagnosis
In May 2016, the Tragically Hip announced that frontman Gord Downie had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, sending ripples of heartbreak across a country that had adopted the band's unique Canadian rock hits as secondary national anthems. The beloved Hip also announced it would embark on a 15-show tour of its final album, Man Machine Tour, which would end in the band's hometown of Kingston, Ont. The final show, titled The Tragically Hip: A National Celebration, aired commercial-free across all CBC platforms to more than 11.7 million Canadians, honouring the spirited band as its members lovingly bid farewell through their greatest hits.
Following the tour, Downie announced his Secret Path project — an album and graphic novel of the same name — which would tell the story of Chanie Wenjack, a young Anishinaabe boy who froze to death in 1966 after escaping from a residential school.
Downie died on Oct. 17, 2017, leaving behind an unshakeable, everlasting legacy of advocacy and bright Canadian pride.
2016: Leonard Cohen dies at 82 years old
On Nov. 7, 2016, after five decades of writing and creating legendary art, Leonard Cohen died at his home in Los Angeles — not quite a month after releasing his final album, You Want it Darker, a perfectly crafted goodbye from a man who seemed ready to face death. Tributes, murals and memorials celebrating the great Montreal singer-songwriter and poet sprouted across Canada and beyond. (Kate McKinnon famously opened Saturday Night Live one week later with a stirring piano version of "Hallelujah,"dressed as recently defeated presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton.) On the eve of the first anniversary of his death, the tribute concert Tower of Song: A Memorial Tribute to Leonard Cohen brought artists including Elvis Costello, Lana Del Rey, Courtney Love, Sting and more together at Montreal's Bell Centre to celebrate Cohen's iconic work.
2016: Yannick Nézet-Séguin is named music director of the Metropolitan Opera
"Being demanding is not the same thing as making people afraid," Yannick Nézet-Séguin explained recently to the New York Times, articulating his approach to leadership and the craft of conducting that has catapulted him to the top of his field. As only the third music director in the Metropolitan Opera's history, Nézet-Séguin maintains high standards through empathy, not tyranny, and seems poised to lead the company into a golden age, turning a page on the turmoil surrounding his predecessor's departure.
Since his appointment, reviewers have praised his "bold interpretive ideas" (Pelléas et Mélisande), "vehemence without a trace of melodramatic excess" (La Traviata) and "urgency and incisiveness" (Parsifal), and while Nézet-Séguin continues to impress in Verdi and Wagner, his plans at the Met also include exciting commissions and bold repertoire choices.
2016: The Célineaissance arrives
The word "Célineaissance" has made its way into our vocabulary in a big way this year, but Céline Dion's renaissance has been years in the making. After her husband and longtime manager, René Angélil, died in January 2016, Dion took some time off from her longstanding Las Vegas residency to be with her family. When she returned a month later, it was with a video tribute to Angélil and an emotional opening number, a cover of Barbra Streisand's "With One More Look at You." While still grieving, she began to look to her future: Dion soon added 27 more dates to her Vegas calendar that year, and released Encore un soir, her first French-language album since 2012.
Then Dion's Vogue Couture Week video came out in 2017, and we saw her indulge in — and delightfully pull off — haute couture while having the best time. It's a balance she was also striking on her 3.8-million-follower Instagram account: sincere, authentic and funny as hell. We'd get another glimpse of this in May 2018 with her Deadpool 2 video for "Ashes," where she indignantly says that her voice "only goes to 11" after being asked to turn it down. 2018 was also when Dion announced the end of what would be her eight-year-long (and second) Las Vegas residency, clearing the deck for the latter half of 2019: when she'd release Courage, her first English-language album in six years, and head out on her first world tour in more than a decade.
2017: Shania Twain makes a triumphant return
Shania Twain released her first album in 15 years in September 2017, and fans were more than ready for the country music queen's return. Now debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart and kicked off a sold-out 2018 tour that was supposed to end in August of that year but was extended to December. The album was just the beginning, though. Twain swept the Canadian Country Music Association Awards in 2018, winning the Generation Award and the awards for top-selling album and top-selling Canadian album — all while performing hosting duties. And now she's back in Vegas: December saw Twain's return to Caesars Palace after a five-year hiatus, and it is a hit parade.
2019: Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill hits Broadway
Jagged Little Pill has always been a record about accountability — to ourselves most of all — and this is thrillingly true in the album's transition from shelf to stage. The songs are as vital, thoughtful, and compelling as you remember. All the hits from the blockbuster 1995 album are recontextualized and revitalized to stirring effect. Alanis Morissette and Glen Ballard do a beautiful job translating the music and lyrics while fully engaging with Diablo Cody's feminist, contemporary story about a family fracturing under the weight of their own secrets.