Savannah Ré captures the back and forth of desire

Story by Sarah MacDonald | Tuesday December 1st, 2020

When Savannah Ré sings about desire on her debut project, Opia, it’s skin-tingling. “Homies” keeps the body warm. “Where You Are” yearns, with her honeyed vocals backed by moody beats. Ré’s approach to desire is specific to her experience, yet the feelings she’s singing about are universal: the weight of a text not answered; anxiety swirling around texting someone too much; waiting by the phone for relief. Once that built-up heat is exchanged, once those bodies give in to each other, it becomes overwhelmingly intense and beautiful. Many Toronto music-makers capture desire well; Ré, the Scarborough newcomer, is remarkable at it.

Savannah ReShe cut her writing teeth in camps like Amazon’s all-woman creative camp for WondaGurl’s debut album, the Keep Cool/RCA writing camp, and SOCAN’s Kenekt Songwriting Camp. She drew the ear of R&B legend Babyface, has co-written with Normani and Daniel Caesar, and was hand-picked to be the opening act on a Jessie Reyez tour. All of these heavy-hitter career moves came before Opia.

The new nine-song recording – tracing the complexities of desire, connection, and vulnerability – took years to take the shape it has now, because Ré is intentional with what she wants to say. Some of the songs are two or three years old, but they’re on the record for a reason.

“I’m not-hyper religious or anything, but I do believe in God, and I do think that God’s timing is perfect,” says Ré. “I think that if I tried to rush this project, and put it out at another time, it wouldn’t be what it is now.” This perspective feels like a rarity in pop music, as artists are expected to move quickly to keep audiences entertained. But Ré was unbothered, ensuring, she says, that the story within the music was structured clearly, and according to her own vision. Producers Boi-1da and YogiTheProducer, her husband, leave important imprints on its sound.

Thinking ahead, even just a couple of weeks after Opia’s release, Ré says she wants another project out in early 2021. “Now that I’ve done the debut, I have a much better idea of what I want to say,” she says.

Opia emphasizes a connection so strong, the other person can see right into your soul. The EP’s title comes from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, where “opia” refers to an uncomfortable feeling of being looked at directly, and the vulnerability of being truly seen. Ré went literal for the video concept of the title track, influenced by the work of Marina Abramović. In it, couples and strangers sit across from one another, talking and staring. This included the singer-songwriter and her husband.

Ré says that she purposefully titled her record this way, not only because of the shape of the work, but also because she personally demurs in the face of that intensity, even with her own husband. She laughs about sitting across from him in the video, saying, “Why did I want to do this? Even though we’re married, you never just sit across from somebody and stare at them!”

Opia  perceives emotional connection graciously, as on “Solid,” a love song that Ré and Yogi worked on for several months, trying to perfect it. And while Ré’s partnership is crucial to her, she says it’s equally important to understand that she writes about her life fully, showing the experiences she’s had before her husband… including other relationships.

There’s a certain perception of married women when they express sensuality; Ré is adamantly against it. “I hate the stereotype that just because you’re married now, you didn’t have a life before,” she says. “Just because you’re married, it doesn’t mean that the other person owns you. You’re still separate human beings.” Ré and Yogi have been together for five years, married for the last two, and their professional lives are thoroughly braided together. But, she says, “he’s been an incredible producer on his own. I do my thing, I’m a singer-songwriter on my own, and then we happen to be married.”

Ré was influenced by Beyoncé as a songwriter, when she discovered Queen Bey’s credits on “Dangerously In Love.” Like Ré, Beyoncé happens to be a married woman, and also a sensual and sexual person. She’s scrutinized for songs rooted in autobiography, and perhaps also for those that aren’t – as though she should exclusively sing about her husband Jay-Z. The contradictory narratives can be too much: one that says desire isn’t yours to hold, and another, outdated one, that says the woman is responsible for the desire required to keep a marriage alive.

“I think marriage is great, but I think people need to stop thinking about it as a cage,” says Ré. “It’s not a cage. I can still say whatever I want, and he can still say whatever he wants. And together, we can still be who we want to be.”

Without these affirmations of a self before she wed, and staying true to who she is, Ré wouldn’t be the compelling artist she is, nor would Opia be as tender and fiery. It’s difficult for a married woman to be fully herself – complicated and attentive, loving and desirous. With Ré continuing to be unapologetically and genuinely herself, she helps change the narrative.

Photo by Roxanne Selleck

Sophia Bel: Sweet Revenge of the Princess of the Dead

Story by Dominic Tardif | Wednesday December 2nd, 2020

A few hours before our online appointment with Sophia Bel, Bonsound’s friendly spokesperson informs us that the Montreal label’s new recruit loves answering questions on her work as a music producer, and that she actually co-produced every track of her new EP, Princess of the Dead, Vol.II.

Sophia BelOf course, absolutely, we’d love to: we’ll be sure to ask her to talk about that. Still, when the press relations officer has to point out to reporters that you are one of the main sound architects of your own songs, does that mean that there are still people out there who find it hard to believe that a woman can take on such responsibilities?

“Apparently yes,” Bel replies, live from a moving car, as she was returns from a few days off in the countryside. “The other day, someone asked me, ‘Was “Voyage astral” [a piece on which Choses Sauvages band member Félix Bélisle worked] done by Félix? I wouldn’t want to take credit away from the people I’m working with, I’m not all by myself. But I sometimes feel that people assume, because I’m a woman, that I stay away from that [production].”

In order to create music that sounds as much as possible like what she was hearing in her head, and in her heart, it was imperative that the Princess of the Dead get involved with that crucial aspect of the creative process.

“I needed to have some control,” she says. “In the past, when I wasn’t producing, I would write on guitar, or on piano, and be at the mercy of what some of my collaborators wanted to do with my songs. Now that I’m playing a more active role in the creation of the instrumentation, of the musical vibe, I feel that I can go deeper into my vision. In spite of the fact, well… I do realize that seeing your vision through is a lifelong work.”

After getting nearly 600,000 views on Spotify with Vol. 1 of the Princess of the Dead diptych (released in April 2019), on the eagerly anticipated follow-up Bel recorded a zillion different references borrowed from the 1990s. They ranged from the trance/drum’n’bass beat of “Paralysis,” the first instrumental piece entirely produced by the artist herself, to “You’re Not Real You’re Just a Ghost” – in which she gives a brazen finger to a man she used to love, who suddenly disappeared without trace or explanation. The song boasts an unapologetically pop-punk chorus, for which we would have voted enthusiastically on Top5.musiquePlus.com when Avril Lavigne was the reigning queen there.

“When I’m fooling around behind a mic, I often try to sound a bit like Blink-82,” says Bel. “I love the relatable, honest side of pop-punk. But I’d never dared to sing like that for real before,” she says, as she remembers the family car trips, when her big brother took control of the radio with his Good Charlotte albums. Sophia herself went through her own emo period later on, which caused some mean boys to call her the Princess of the Dead, a title she’s reclaimed today. She’s the one who is going to have the last laugh.

“When we wrote You’re Not Real…, I’d just come out of a relationship, and I was going through a period of serious frustration,” says Bel. “That’s when CRi [one of the EP’s chief collaborators] handed me his guitar and said, ‘Play.’ Instead of answering, ‘Forget it, I’m not a good enough guitar player,’ I just started playing, he started adding percussion, and that became the perfect vehicle to help me overcome of my frustration.”

And to help her poke some fun at herself, by over-playing the anger she was feeling at the time, perhaps?  “Yes!” she says. “I always like to bring in an element that shows that I’m not taking myself too seriously. The song also is a criticism of the fact that I don’t know how to communicate. It was like being 15 again, I felt rejected, and I was listening to teary-eyed Fall Out Boy songs.”

The same mixture of glowing sincerity and sweet irony is at work on her first attempt in the Ten Zen language, “Voyage astral,” a vaporous trip-hop meditation on the primal state to which the esoteric practice of the astral journey helps one return. The closest tie between the 1990s and Princess of the Dead, Vol. II likely is, in fact, the kind of foraging exercise that spans music genres that was mastered by Beck and Bran Van 3000.

“‘Voyage astral’ is a song dealing with the many lives one can live during the same lifetime,” says Bel, “but I thought it would be fun to talk about it while slightly over-emphasizing everything that can bring to mind the New Age Revival we’re witnessing with the Millennials and Generation Z.”

Bel herself becomes part of that revival when she reads her girlfriends’ Tarot cards. “In my book, the Tarot doesn’t have to be an esoteric thing,” she says. “It doesn’t mean you’re reading into the future. It’s not the cards you draw, but the way you interpret them that will tell you something about what’s going on in your life, about your subconscious, about what’s troubling you. What I like about the Tarot is that it gets discussions going. It’s therapeutic.”

Just like music.

 

Photo by SOCAN

Michael McCarty’s seven-year transformation of SOCAN’s Membership Strategy

Story by Karen Bliss | Monday November 30th, 2020

Michael McCarty is leaving SOCAN on Nov. 30, 2020, after seven years as our Chief Membership & Business Development Officer, which included such huge accomplishments as bringing Drake and Joni Mitchell back as members; re-branding membership recruitment staff as the cooler, more talent-friendly “A&R”; and making some tech decisions that helped bring more royalties to creators, more quickly and accurately. McCarty will be providing consulting services until April 2021, to help transition to what’s next.

“I started looking back on what my job was when I came in, which was to re-build the membership, and get all the people back that we’d lost, [and] make sure we keep the next generation of top creators and publishers. When you look at it from that point of view, it’s mission accomplished,” says McCarty, who was inducted into the Canadian Music & Broadcast Industry Hall of Fame in 2019 after more than 40 years in the business.

McCarty comes from a creative background. A drummer himself, he started his career in the 1970s as a recording engineer and producer working for the late Jack Richardson (The Guess Who) and Bob Ezrin (Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, Peter Gabriel) in Toronto. His first industry job was as creative manager at ATV Music Group Canada, then on to CBS/SBK and SBK Records and Publishing in Los Angeles. He made his biggest mark as President of EMI Music Publishing Canada for 17 years, signing and developing such acts as Billy Talent, Sum 41, Three Days Grace, Alexisonfire, LEN, esthero, The Matthew Good Band, and Moist. Then, in 2009, after EMI was sold, he became the President of music publishing company ole for three years.

When SOCAN brought him in, his job was two-fold: Chief Membership Officer, responsible for recruiting, retaining, and re-patriating members (the three Rs), and Business Development Officer, helping to bring SOCAN into the 21st Century, get songwriters paid more quickly and efficiently, and make sure no potential royalties were falling through the cracks.

As the Chief Membership Officer, one of his first moves was to re-build the department and create an A&R team. “You have to have talent assessment skills,” says McCarty. “You have to have a nose for who’s going to be important. You have to have talent development skills. How does a person get from point a to point B in the industry and how can we help them do that? Or how can we, using that knowledge, know where the next stars are? And then, finally, you have to have people networking skills. So it’s A&R. It doesn’t matter what you call it.”

The department “knocked it out of the park,” he boasts. “We re-patriated virtually everybody we lost,” naming Drake, Boi-1da, Noah “40” Shebib, The Weeknd, Shawn Mendes, Alessia Cara, as well as the legendary Joni Mitchell.

As the Business Development Officer, he says, “One of the seeds that I’ve sewn that I’m most excited about is we developed this API strategy — [API stands for] application programming interface — that’s a fancy way of saying, it’s a way that one computer platform talks to another.

“I believe unshakably that in the future [of] the worldwide music industry, from creation to distribution to consumption, is going to be one giant, seamlessly integrated network. And in order to participate in that network, you have to use APIs.

“So we have APIs now for virtually every capability of our platform. For instance, registering songs or registering concerts with us,” he says, referring to the creation of SOCAN Labs, which came up with a new member portal that recommends set lists to an artist based on their previous submissions. SOCAN also partnered with Calgary’s Muzooka, a metadata-sharing app for the live music ecosystem.

“They built a connection to our APIs, so that if you’re a SOCAN member using the Muzooka app, you can get into your SOCAN account, look up your repertoire, make a set list. Then you press a button and send that set list and all the concert information to us,” McCarty says. “That’s been incredibly successful. We’re processing hundreds of concerts that way, which makes it easy for the member and more efficient for us.”

McCarty isn’t revealing yet exactly what he’ll do next, but he says it will involve re-patriating Canadian intellectual property.

“Canadian music is killing it,” he says. “The problem is that almost all the intellectual property [IP] has left the country, is owned by non-Canadian companies, and almost none of the intellectual property revenue, copyright revenue, comes back to Canada,” he says. “My passion is going to be built around re-patriating the IP, and revenue from the IP, in order to help ensure a sustainable ecosystem for future generations of Canadian creators, so that we can keep the success train rolling.”