Juno Award winning singer-songwriter Aysanabee (pronounced Ace-in-abbey) will take to the stage at the Townshend Theatre on Saturday Feb. 8 on his cross-Canada Now and Then Tour.
The artist who has close ties to northwestern Ontario will be the fourth artist in the Tour de Fort Series this year.
Born in Sandy Lake First nation, north of Red Lake, Aysanabee recently returned from touring in Australia with Kim Churchill who has played in the Fort Frances area before.
Growing up, Aysanabee’s mother moved the family around, with stints in Manitoba, as well as the Kenora and Dryden areas before settling in Kaministiquia, just outside Thunder Bay.
“I think my mom always kind of had this dream to kind of live off grid and have solar power and a hobby farm and a garden and have some livestock and stuff,” he said. “But all that stuff costs a lot of money so we ended up just living in the bush without electricity.”
Living in a rural area without the modern amenities people would prefer, Aysanabee grew up with a few toys, he says.
“I had these three things, one of the things was, like, this dune buggy made out of a lawn mower,” He said. “I built this track in the back, and would just kind of drive in circles. And so, one day, I built a jump for this dune buggy, and I was going around, picking up speed, and then suddenly I took the jump, and then the thing just shattered. Then I had a bow and arrow and I was doing target practice and just kind of running amok. And then, like, an arrow ricocheted and flattened the tire on my mom’s vehicle. So then that got taken away. Then there was just a guitar my brother had left when, like, he went to the city to go to school. And, yeah, I just got into music, and I started playing.”
After Aysanabee started high school in the city and started making friends he soon had access to the internet and he learned more about the kind of music he liked.
“I made some friends in high school and my one friend had electricity and the internet and youtube, then it became a thing where I would just go to his house on lunch breaks and watch these guitar players,” he said. “Then I kind of started teaching myself, playing with the tuning knobs to try to figure out these open tunings…”
One of the guitarists he discovered online was none other than his recent touring partner Kim Churchill.
“It’s a wild full-circle moment, I just got back from Australia, where I was touring around the country with Kim Churchill and I was like wow, this is one of the people who kind of taught me guitar in a way,” he said. “Suddenly I’m sharing stages with him on the other side of the world and then having this wild adventure.”
The award winner says the push to pursue a career in music came after a near-death experience.
I fell through the ice and was kind of clawing my way across it. And I was just like, ‘damn, this is where the story ends and I didn’t do anything to try and reach my dream,’ right? And like, I was just, going through this ice is breaking…All these things are going through my mind,” he said. But I did it, you know, I made it across, and I started a fire, and I dried off, and I just had, like, all this time to think about,like, what am I doing with my life?”
Shortly after that experience he moved to Toronto.
“Coming from my background, my grandma was always just kind of like, ‘make sure you have a plan A and a plan B and Plan C and A Plan D.’ And so when I moved to Toronto to pursue music like I I ended up applying to go to college as well for like, three things, three wildly different things. I applied to nursing, I applied to massage therapy, and I applied to journalism, okay, and then I ended up getting into all three programs,” he said. “So I ended up choosing journalism, because I was like, ‘Well, this is the closest thing to music, you know, it still involves storytelling. It still involves writing. So I went to school for that, and then ended up kind of working in that field.”
He would go on to work for CTV as a digital content creator for a while after deciding that having a career and making music on the side could be a good fit.
“I got a good job in journalism and was kind of feeling good with where I was at,” he said. “I’m never gonna stop making music, it’s something I enjoy doing and so, but at that point, I just thought, like, ‘okay, music will just be like, the thing I like doing when I’m done work, you know?’ So I think just that shift in mindset of I’m just going to make music that’s kind of important to me, and work on the projects that I want to work on.
It would be conversations with his grandfather over the course of the pandemic that shaped his first album, Watin. Inspired by conversations with his grandfather over the course of the pandemic he started writing songs about his grandfather’s life stories.
It was a trip to an indigenous music conference that accelerated this process.
“I was scrolling through social media and applied to play at the International Indigenous Music Summit,” he said. “I sent in a performance video and these two women, Shoshona Kish and Amanda Rheaume who founded the summit were just like ‘who are you and how come we’ve never heard of you?’”
Rheaume was a performer in the Tour De Fort concert series last year, along with Kish she has founded a record label called Ishkōdé Records with the hope of fostering and amplifying indigenous voices.
After meeting the two, Aysanabee told them about the project he was working on, about how he had interviewed his grandfather and was slowly, after his day job, writing songs based on his grandfather’s stories.
“I had like a demo and a half and an idea and they were like ‘we’ve got this wild idea, we’re gonna start a record label and we want to sign you as our first artist,’ the singer recounted. “I was just blown away. I’d never been approached by a record label before. And in hindsight too, it’s kind of wild all the things we’ve accomplished in the last three years. They’re a brand new record label, I was working on a project that wasn’t finished. Record labels traditionally won’t sign an artist unless they’ve kind of done a ton of the work already, like they have a billion followers on Tiktok or unless they have a million streams… So for them to kind of take a chance on an artist based solely on ‘wow, we believe in this project and we believe this is a story that needs to be told.’”
That first album, Watin, was nominated for the 2023 CBC Music Polaris Prize which honours the top Canadian-produced albums each year as well as the Juno award for Contemporary Indigenous Artist of the Year, but didn’t win either award.
“It didn’t win, but I think people were still hearing about me to be completely honest,” he said. “But I think that definitely gave me a platform and then so many more people kind of dug into the album and listened to it.”
In 2024, his second album, Here and Now, was nominated for Contemporary Indigenous Artist of the Year, and won. He also won the Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year.
Having received mentorship from Rheaume and Kish, Aysanabee is also looking to pass on the knowledge of the industry that has led him to succeed. He put out an open call for indigenous artists to send in auditions for an opportunity to open for him on the upcoming tour.
Sara Kae, an artist from Lake Helen First Nation, near Red Rock, will be opening for Aysanabee at shows in Sioux Lookout, Dryden, and Fort Frances.
Aysanabee still wants to open the door to any local First Nations artists to get in touch as there may still be some opportunity to meet up and hang out even if artists weren’t chosen to be the opening act.
“I just want to note that even if an artist has been announced in your community, and you still want to apply, still do because even if it’s just like, coming and hanging out and having coffee with us or something, chatting or maybe there’s, another way we can find get them to be involved in the show as well, it’s never too late.
Aysanabee is performing at 7:30 p.m. at the Townshend Theatre on Feb. 8, 2025. Tickets are available at tourdefort.com, Ski’s Variety, and The Fort Frances Public Library, cash only at in-person locations, credit cards can be used online. Some tickets may also be available at the door.
