Pop singer Tyler Shaw writes well with others

Story by Perry Stern | Wednesday April 24th, 2019

Like many other songwriters before (and after) him, Tyler Shaw unashamedly declares that the first song he ever wrote was, in a word, “awful.” But at the time? “Oh my goodness, I thought was great. I wrote it about a girl I had a crush on. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this girl is mine! If she hears this song, I’m gonna get the girl.’” Whether it would have worked or not we’ll never know – she never heard the song, “But I got the girl anyway. One of my best friends still has the recording and, I think it was a couple of years ago, he bumped into me and said, ‘Remember this?’ And I said, ‘I wish I didn’t.’”

Shaw, now a two-time SOCAN Award winner and two-time JUNO Award nominee, with two albums (Yesterday in 2015, Intuition in September of 2018) and a handful of certified hit singles to his name, has clearly evolved as a songwriter. It’s a bit ironic that a singer, who first captured the industry’s attention when he won the MuchMusic Coca-Cola Covers Contest in  2012, had already put a good five years of songwriting behind him by then.

“At 13 years old, I started writing songs every single day, about everything,” Tyler says from his home in Toronto, 10 days after his 26th birthday. “Break-ups, falling in love, school stuff, everything and anything. As you practice songwriting, that increases your skills – just like anything, if you practice [like piano or guitar]. I was literally writing a song a day, maybe two a day, when I was 13. When I got signed as an artist in the industry, signed under a label [Sony Music Canada], that’s when things started to develop even more.”

By the time he moved from his hometown of Vancouver to attend university on Prince Edward Island, he’d firmly established his musical ambition, and played at local and campus bars. Once the song contest led to a label signing, everything went into high gear. His debut single, “Kiss Goodnight” (in 2012) was certified platinum, and his latest release “With You”, from the album Intuition, has been certified gold, and viewed on YouTube more than 13 million times. On April 12, 2019, a new, French version of the single, featuring Sara Diamond, was released.

The learning process was daunting. When Shaw started working on his first album, he had to figure out how to collaborate with others, almost all strangers, except by reputation.  “If you can walk into a room with someone,” he recalls, “not meeting them, not knowing anything about them except what they’ve done musically, and immediately connect with them within the first 30 seconds, the first minute or so, you think you can come up with something special. But I’ve walked into a room, before this last album, and it’s… it’s not shady, but it’s just not the vibe that I would want to have in a room with a songwriter. It’s not welcoming, it’s not warm, it’s just cold and uninviting. When that happens, I push through because, well, you never know, but it generally doesn’t go well. I like to keep a positive frame of mind and just say, ‘OK, maybe he’s having an off day… And maybe something can come of that feeling, you never know. But, generally, it doesn’t work out that way.”

Writing fast for film
In 2017, Shaw took some time away from his recording career to try acting. He didn’t see it as a major detour. “That was a lot of fun,” he says. “In a film called The Meaning of Life, I was playing the character of a therapeutic clown for kids who was aspiring to be the next big musician. In a way, the role itself, I could definitely relate to… Not the clown part!” he adds, laughing. “During the movie there are five songs that I’ve got to sing, and I didn’t actually know that I was supposed to create these songs until the first day I got on set. They asked me, ‘Hey, do you have that song written for this scene?’ And I was, ‘What song?’ So I ran back to my green room, and in five minutes I wrote a song for the scene. I was already in the emotion of the scene, so it made it a lot easier, I believe, to write that song while I was in that moment. That happened five times, where I need to go write songs right now for this scene. It happened so naturally. It worked for me. ‘Give me a half an hour, max, and I’ll write the song.’”

Not to say he thought the songwriting came easily. “Songwriting is always a challenge. Every single day is a challenge. Some days you don’t even write a song because there’s nothing there. Some days you write two to three songs. It’s not like it’s harder now to write songs, it’s always been a difficult challenge.” And Shaw sometimes sets the challenge himself.

Recognizing that most of his songs are the romantic sort, on Intuition he set out to broaden his spectrum. “I love ‘love,’ I think everyone is a sucker for ‘love’… It’s very relatable, but at the same time, so is life in general,” he says. “The majority of the songs I write are love songs, but I love the angle of not writing [another one] and talking more about things that aren’t about love.” He’s gotten e-mails from fans saying that songs like “Help Me” and “Anybody Out There” have helped them through some hard times.

Shaw’s experience, smartly deployed at the SOCAN Songwriters Circle at the 2019 JUNOs, has taught him what attitude works best when starting out on a new collaboration. “I’m an open book,” he says. “I have experience coming at me from the songwriters, from the producers, so I wasn’t offended when someone said, ‘Oh, this lyric in this verse could be better.’ I just took it as a challenge. It wasn’t hard to hear that stuff. Everyone has their opinion, and I write the best I can, so if someone comes back and says, ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ that’s cool. I’ll challenge myself to make it better, and make more sense.” What else is there to do? That’s what evolution is all about.

Photo by Andréanne Lupien

Jipé Dalpé: Crawling back to himself

Story by Dominic Tardif | Thursday April 25th, 2019

Jipé Dalpé“Elle a été rough l’année dernière” (“Last year was rough”), Jipé Dalpé sings on “Lac Renaud.” The sentence isn’t a lie, but it doesn’t paint the whole picture. You see, he probably wishes the rough patch would’ve only lasted a year. “Had I told the whole truth, I would’ve sung that the last two-and-a-half years seemed incredibly long,” says the songwriter, marking each word and laughing softly.

We can hardly blame him for choosing to emphasize the rhyme. Despite this tiny factual twist, Dalpé has never been as autobiographical as on Après le crash, his third full-length album, and his first release since 2015’s L’homme allumette.

“C’est juste une peu d’espoir/Pas une toune pour s’en faire accroire” (“It’s just a bit of hope/Not a song to make believe”), he sings on “Lac Renaud,” two short sentences that perfectly express his bent toward transparency. It’s the naked truth that Dalpé espouses, or seems to.

In July of 2015, Dalpé exited from a bar where he drank merrily with his sister. Being the responsible person that he is, he left his car behind and called an Uber. At the intersection of Saint-Joseph Boulevard and Iberville Street (one of Montréal’s most notoriously dangerous intersections), his driver accidentally ran a red light and crashed into another vehicle.

Out of the smoke, the passenger literally had to crawl across the pavement so he could safely wait for the ambulance. He will figuratively crawl for several months: concussion, herniated discs, labyrinthitis, neurological issues in the arms, hearing impairment, fractured sternum.

“I read that the sternum is the only bone protecting the heart,” remembers the Sherbrooke native, while placing a hand on his chest. “When I read that, maybe I was trying to make sense of the accident, but that’s exactly what was happening: there was nothing left to protect my heart.”

It’s worth mentioning, at this point, that the young forty-something’s heart had already been strained a few months before his accident, when a very long relationship came to an end. The album is called Après le crash (After the Crash), but it could very well have been titled “after the crashes,” plural. Those crashes deprived him of everything inside of  him that sought to impress, or fit a certain idea of what a songwriter should be.

“I didn’t really know why I was writing when I started making tunes,” Dalpé says. “I wrote because I wanted to sing. Nowadays, I want everything to be as visceral as possible. I don’t want to sugar-coat, to show I can write. I just need to write and get rid of all the useless shit.”

The body is a duo

“Have you thought of doing something else, sir?” a SAAQ (Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec, which handles insurance claims after car accidents) employee one day asked Jipé Dalpé. Something else, as in, “have you thought of finding a new career now that you have a hard time singing, playing your guitar, and blowing in your trumpet?”

That was a brutal and angst-ridden question, for someone who’s been playing in bars since he was 15 years old. It kicked off a long, introspective process that allowed Dalpé to get over his fear that everything he’s built would collapse if he took even a moment of rest. It allowed him to realize that his deep-seated artistic identity didn’t depend on his usual hyperactivity.

Writing Tips: Useless shit?
“Useless shit is tripping over mannerisms around people to avoid ruffling their feathers, being polite because we’re afraid to hurt them. It’s also tripping over meaningless, cute imagery. I teach a writing workshop, and I always ask students this question: ‘Why are you saying that? Your sentence is well written, but what’s the story you want to tell?’ I apply that requirement to myself, too. I have a violent outlook on my lyrics, and I re-write a lot to get to what I’m really trying to say. The images are there to support what you are saying, not the opposite.”

“It’s very difficult in this trade to get your head above water and simply exist,” says this DIY champion of self-production. “Everything is a question of opportunity, being in the right place at the right time, of meeting this person who, the next day, will think of you when they’re looking for an arranger. There’s always an e-mail you should be sending. And since I was never signed to a label, I’ve always considered earning a living with my music a victory. For the longest time, I was convinced I would lose everything I had built if I slowed down.”

Après le crash was produced by legendary bass player Jean-François Lemieux. It’s both an ode to friendship, considering all the musicians, songwriters, and music composers who contributed to it – Ariane Moffatt, Marie-Pierre Arthur, Olivier Langevin, François Lafontaine, Pierre Fortin, David Goudreault – and an ode to the body. A body that’s getting better (“Du muscle”), a body that rejoices (“Avant tes yeux”), and a body that lets go of pride and finally accepts the help it’s offered (“Après le crash”).

“My head has always run 100 miles an hour, and everything else would follow without me paying any attention to it,” says Dalpé. “But I realized that it’s actually a duo. There’s my head, yeah, but there’s everything else.” After the crash, taking care of oneself.

Photo by , Left to right/De gauche à droite : Honie B, by/par Guillaume Boucher; Sarahmée by/par Félix Renaud; Frannie Holder by/par Marilou Nadeau.

Women in Québec’s increasingly inclusive hip-hop scene

Story by Olivier Boisvert-Magnen | Wednesday April 24th, 2019

Despite its constant mutation, Québec’s hip-hop scene is still a male-dominated affair. Systematically relegated to the background, female rappers are still hopeful that things will change, and that the industry will lend them a strong hand in the near future.

“The time for female rappers to get more exposure is long overdue,” wrote journalist Yasmine Seck in VICE Québec back in January 2018. “Have women been left behind during Québec’s Golden Age of rap?” wrote La Presse journalist Stéphanie Vallet in an exhaustive special report that instantly turned into a hot-button issue on social networks.

For Frannie Holder of rap trio Random Recipe, this sudden media frenzy around women’s place on the local rap scene can only be beneficial. “We need to talk about it constantly,” she says. “If you ever hear people saying they’re fed up hearing about this, tell them that we’re even more fed up of having to endure this situation.”

Rapper Sarahmée has recently launched her second album, Irréversible, and she wants the current debate to turn into concrete action. “All has been said in the media, now is the time for bookers to show us what they’ve got,” she says. “Things are moving very slowly, so far… It’s always the same headliners at festivals. When I look at what all those events are offering, it feels like we’re three years behind. In the long run, it’s going to get boring for audiences. A lot of people have written to me saying that I’m not getting booked enough despite the excellent media coverage I’ve been getting.”

This situation also bothers Frannie Holder. “Festivals argue that they’re at the tail end of the production chain, and that they depend on what’s on offer, but ultimately, they often book only popular artists in the hopes of seeling as many tickets as possible,” she says. “I find that hypocritical, because if a booker only goes for what’s the most popular, they could easily be replaced by an algorithm. How does that deserve public subsidies [grants]? In Canada, there is an educational duty that comes with the arts. The arts must embody social change, and meet the needs of the people. I performed in an equal representation festival in Brazil, and I saw a ton of great female rappers that inspired me.”

Gatineau-born, Montréal-based battle rapper Honie B is also preoccupied by the issue of female representation in hip-hop. However, the 22-year-old rapper – who’s working on her first solo project – says she wants to avoid any kind of positive discrimination. “I wouldn’t want to be booked for a show just because the promoters have to meet a female quota,” she says. “I’d find that insulting.”

To her, it’s only a matter of time before women take the place they deserve. “Rap is still in its infancy here,” she says. “We’re slowly getting accustomed to the culture, and that means women need some time to emancipate. Whether you like it or not, it’s still a rough scene. You need to be very self-assured to stand out.”

That’s precisely what’s happening to Naya Ali. As the only rapper signed to the heavily hip-hop-oriented label Coyote Records, the Anglophone Montrealer has enjoyed new-found success since the release of her debut EP, Higher Self, last fall. Label President and founder Rafael Perez was instantly on board. “She’s fresh, she has a strong personality and a lot of drive,” he says. “As soon as I heard her demo, I was like ‘Wow! Where did she come from?’ We weren’t looking to sign a female rapper, but when you’re as impressed as I was, it’s awesome.”

But he’s the first to admit he doesn’t get a lot of demos from female rappers. “There’s probably a lot of great music that never makes it to my ears, young artists doing exceptional music in their basement,” he says. “And quite frankly, try as I might, I don’t find a lot of new female rappers… I believe keeping the conversation going in the media is a good thing, because it might inspire others to want to showcase their music.”

“We need projects that correspond to the reality of women… We need to consolidate this mentoring and career development into actual programs.” — Frannie Holder

All this talk has gotten the ball rolling. Recently, Fondation Musicaction – a Québec-based organization that supports the production and marketing of a fair share of albums by Francophone artists in Canada – launched a pilot program supporting the mothers of infants (0 to 2 years old) in the development of their international careers. “This initiative came about because a lot of women musicians felt hindered professionally because they had a child; going on tour became way too expensive,” says Anne-Karine Tremblay, Musicaction Director of Corporate and Legal Affairs, about this exploratory measure that “allows the expenditure for an assistant entirely devoted to caring for a child while travelling.”

Sarahmée welcomes such an initiative with open arms. “I was told time and time again that having a child when you’re a female rapper is difficult,” she says. “People close to me were told stuff like, ‘Are you sure? How are you going to manage?’ It’s a truly great idea that’s in sync with the lifestyle of women, which is a lot less sedentary than it used to be.”

Frannie Holder agrees: “It’s like telling women that they don’t have to give up their careers to be a mother. I’ve seen many women delay their career way into their thirties, while men are often at their peak by then.”

According to the 34-year-old singer-songwriter, it’s through such initiatives, centred around women’s needs, that female rappers will be able to stand out more. “We need projects that correspond to the reality of women,” she says. “Helping each other out as female rappers is great, but we need to consolidate this mentoring and career development into actual programs.”

One source of financing for the development of a specific skill – whether it’s through a conference, a course, a workshop or a seminar – is the SOCAN Foundation’s Professional Development Assistance Program. Just as accessible to young female rappers, the Foundation’s Travel Assistance Program covers a sizable portion of travel expenses when participating in a showcase or residency, for example. As a matter of fact, Frannie Holder and Montréal rapper Hua Li have both taken advantage of that subsidy in recent years.

Also available are training sessions provided by the Société professionnelle des auteurs et des compositeurs du Québec (SPACQ), which allow artists to fine-tune their trade (training sessions in writing, interpretation, stage presence…) and develop their business-related skills (legal advice about contracts, and how to protect their songs against theft or plagiarism). The over-600-member-strong organization is constantly looking for new artists who want to “professionalize” themselves.

Otherwise, two of the most accessible subsidies for Francophone female rappers are Musicaction’s emerging artist support and song production and promotion programs. The first program is for self-produced, emerging artists, while the second is aimed at independent or signed artists who want to produce four songs “for immediate promotion.” Beyond that, Musicaction’s grants are often geared towards, and more easily obtained by, established record labels. Bear in mind that currently, the three main hip-hop labels in Québec – Disques 7ième Ciel, Explicit Productions, Joy Ride Records – are recognized by Musicaction, and as such receive a yearly stipend from that organization to produce their roster’s albums. Yet none of them has signed a female rapper.

To counter-balance this male domination, Frannie Holder suggests following in the footsteps of the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC), which recently tabled an action plan to achieve gender equality in film before 2020. From now on, a producer can only present two fictional feature-length projects “if one of them is written or directed by a woman.”

“It has made a world of difference in only two years,” says Holder, who’s been sitting of the SOCAN Foundation Board of Directors for about a year. “Now, it’s time to look at the financing offered to musicians by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ), and other such bodies, to gradually move towards gender equality.”

That idea is making progress at Musicaction. “The latest versions of our forms include a male-female survey question, so that we get accurate data on the projects we finance,” says Anne-Karine Tremblay. “Our short-term goal is not gender equality, but we are aware of this issue in top management. We do make an effort to have more female juries. It gives us different ears.”

Without going as far as supporting gender-equal financing for Québe hip-hop, Rafael Perez welcomes change. “I’ll leave that question to the Boards of Directors, because it’s a sensitive issue for me,” says the man who’s signed on Laurence Nerbonne and Marième, two singers with marked rap influences, to his Coyote imprint. “But at the end of the day, I appreciate that the people involved are making more and more efforts [towards the representation of women on the local rap scene]. I think it’s a good thing.”