Whether she’s walking around in Miramichi, or driving the roads of New Brunswick, Maude Sonier always has a pencil handy. Ideas come unexpectedly, “often at the worst possible moment.” After releasing her debut EP, Demi-tour, in March of 2024, her ambition kept growing and she’s now planning a future that seems increasingly within reach. She writes to keep a record of things, to understand what inhabits her, and simply to avoid exploding.
“My best lyric ideas often come to me when I’m walking to a class, or when I’m driving… That means I have to pull over to write a couple of lines so I don’t crash my car,” she says with a giggle.” It’s there, in the margins of daily life, that Sonier writes. She sits at the piano, her forever instrument, and lets words and melodies wash over her all at once. The guitar is sometimes part of the process, but it’s the keyboard that almost always takes centre stage, because it allows her to do everything in a single effort.
She was born in Miramichi, but now she sings for an entire generation of Acadians trying to find representation in the outskirts of the music scene. Demi-tour is a collection of songs written when she was 15, that have stuck with her since. “All the beautiful things happening to me are because of those tunes that I wrote when I knew nothing about anything,” she says, still in low-key disbelief.
This tenderness she has for her younger self is her ultimate strength. She wasn’t expecting to hear back from Miko Roy and Katherine Noël when she Messaged them in the hopes of recording her songs. “They agreed immediately. Not everyone gets that lucky. I had no clue what I was doing, and they were there for me throughout the whole process,” she says.
Since then, her path has widened. She found new confidence in herself by participating in the 2025 Francouvertes. “Competitions are subjective, but it allowed me to believe I’m just as solid as other artists, I guess. We can feel inferior because we’re from New Brunswick and haven’t yet played Quai des Brumes or Pantoum,” she says. “We also have key venues in New Brunswick, but we can quickly feel like we haven’t done enough yet.”
She was also selected to participate in SOCAN Foundation’s Residency for Francophone Artists-Entrepreneurs From Outside Québec, a very formative experience. “It helped me build my skills, figure out where to find resources, and navigate it all a little better,” she says. A few months later, she was awarded the $5,000 SOCAN Foundation grant for an emerging songwriter. “I’m still surprised,” she says. “It’s hard to make music and live in Acadia. Each token of recognition is a breeze carrying you forward.”
Select the image to access the YouTube video of the Maude Sonier song “Demi-tour” (Live à La Grosse Rose)
To her, Acadia is a state of mind that one carries, values, and shares. She dreams of the stage, of course: not as a platform to make it big, but as a shared space. “If one day, I play a show, and five people sing my lyrics, I’ll feel like I’ve made it,” says Sonier. She’s still surprised, in fact, by the receptive crowd that came to hear her sing at the La Noce Festival in early July, in Chicoutimi.
The summer of 2025 was also sprinkled with the magic of her first appearance at the Francos de Montréal, where she sang backup for P’tit Belliveau. “Those weren’t my tunes; they were his, but I’ve never been so emotional,” she remembers. “When we played “L’église de St. Bernard,” thousands of people were singing along. We sang about Baie Sainte-Marie, a place where all these people [have] never set foot. And the crowd didn’t even realize they’d learned to speak ‘Acadjonne.’”
In Maude Sonier’s lyrics, light collides with a smouldering anger; heavy words dancing on bouncy beats. “I’m a very happy person. I see a bee on a flower and I think life is magical… but in my head, I’m always mad about something,” says Sonier. That paradox fuels everything she writes: songs about friendships we can’t control, about anxiety over the future, about the fear of not living a successful life. “I write them to get them out of me,” she says, quietly. “To find peace afterward, I think.”
She’s fuelled by the pop legacy of her generation – think Camp Rock and High School Musical – and the stage-savvy energy of her cheerleading days in Miramichi. Her first full-length album, slated for release in the fall of 2026, is aimed as a determined step towards whom she truly is. Now working with the Acadian Embassy label, she hopes to extend a helping hand to musicians from Acadia — “even if it costs more to bring them in from the Maritimes.”
“I want to record with people from back home, tour all over the place, and bring them with me,” she says, with conviction. All this is happening between University semesters as she wraps up her multi-disciplinary Bachelor’s degree at the Université de Moncton. The courses are hand-picked from fields connected to music and entrepreneurship, so she can be the queen of her own musical future. “No one in the admin office at my University understands what the heck I’m doing, but I’m totally in control,” she says, with a laugh.
And maybe that’s the truth of Maude Sonier: she knows. She welcomes the tremor of the heart that becomes a song, with her arms and her mind wide open. She moves through her craft with the certainty that this is where she’s supposed to be, even coming from Acadia. Even if her voice rises from the margins, it won’t waver.