Raised in Nunavik, Que., a young Elisapie listened to ABBA with her cousins, who would run to her house when the violence in their own home was too much to take.Leeor Wild/Leeor Wild
The start to what Inuk musician Elisapie calls a “healing journey” began as many complicated, cathartic experiences do, with Swedish pop music.
“I’m jogging to ABBA’s Super Trouper, and all of a sudden, tears are on my face,” says the Québécoise singer-songwriter. “I didn’t know what was going on. I mean, who cries to ABBA?”
Perceptive people, that’s who.
Elisapie’s emotionally packed forthcoming album Inuktitut includes 10 ethereal interpretations of pop hits and classic-rock staples from the past, including Metallica’s towering power ballad The Unforgiven, Pink Floyd’s wistful anthem Wish You Were Here and Cyndi Lauper’s elegant love song Time After Time, all sung in Inuktitut.
Though Elisapie ultimately didn’t include an ABBA song on the album, her intense experience listening to the band’s music triggered the project. Raised in Nunavik, Que., a young Elisapie listened to ABBA with her cousins, who would run to her house when the violence in their own home was too much to take.
“I cried a lot making this album,” Elisapie says, speaking from suburban Montreal. “What I am trying to bring back with these songs is my childhood – the sound and the energy there was, and also the sadness I felt. And it’s not just about the songs. It’s a whole other world.”
The Juno winner was brought up by an adoptive family she describes as “caring, yet slightly dysfunctional.” In the small fly-in community of Salluit, she grieved the suicides of cousins, experienced young love, witnessed the effects of colonialism and danced at the village community centre.
Popular music played an important role in community. “The songs of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones were made by white people, but we felt safe around their music,” the trilingual Elisapie says. “Led Zeppelin was a friend to my uncle, a residential-school kid feeling lost. He had Zeppelin to listen to, just as Metallica was a friend to me and my cousins.”
Her version of Metallica’s The Unforgiven (Isumagijunnaitaungituq) features traditional drums and throat singing by Sylvia Cloutier. As a teenager working at Taqramiut Nipingat Inc. (TNI, a pioneering Inuit TV-radio broadcaster), Elisapie actually interviewed Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett. Receiving her first paycheque at the radio station, she noticed it was for more money than her father earned. Traditional male roles in her community had been challenged by colonization.
Elisapie got her start as a performer singing backup in her youth for the popular rock band Sugluk, which was co-led by her uncle, singer George Kakayuk.Leeor Wild/Leeor Wild
“Their power was taken away. All of a sudden, they can’t dictate their lives anymore. I think I needed to make peace with a lot of things like that. That’s why I cried a lot making this album.”
Lots of tears, and much tearing of hair. While bands including Metallica, the Rolling Stones and Blondie quickly okayed Elisapie’s Indigenous interpretations – permission is required for radical reworks of previously recorded music – other song rights were harder to secure. Among the holdouts were Lauper, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.
“At one point it looked liked we were going to end up with a six-song album,” says Elisapie, whose previous album The Ballad of the Runaway Girl, with lyrics in English, French and Inuktitut, was shortlisted for the 2019 Polaris Music Prize. “I was getting a bit depressed.”
Up against the deadline to finalize the album to get it out this fall (Sept. 15), the three holdouts signed off on their songs at the last minute, allowing the Montreal-based record label Bonsound permission to include them on Inuktitut.
Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here was not only problematic when it came to licensing, but artistically as well. Elisapie’s album producer and guitarist Joe Grass did not want to get too close to the original recorded version from the 1975 album of the same name.
“I wasn’t going to play that guitar riff, because it’s so perfect and recognizable,” says Grass. “So, we decided to deconstruct the song and reassemble it. It was a headscratcher for a while.”
The decision was made to bring in the Westerlies, an arty New York-based brass quartet who brought an elegiac, soulful radiance to a song Elisapie sings in memory of friends, family and community members who took their own lives.
“The Westerlies were my guides to free a heaviness that I did not even know was in my body,” Elisapie says.
Perhaps because they’re relatively rare, Indigenous language covers of well-known material get noticed. The late Nunavut singer-songwriter Kelly Fraser launched her career in 2013 with an Inuktitut version of Rihanna’s Diamonds. Fraser tragically took her own life on Christmas Eve in 2019, following a struggle with PTSD caused by “childhood traumas, racism and persistent cyberbullying,” according to her family.
“When you’re so used to people committing suicide, you have to numb yourself,” says Elisapie. “We don’t even cry anymore.”
Elisapie got her start as a performer singing backup in her youth for the popular rock band Sugluk, which was co-led by her uncle, singer George Kakayuk. He and his bandmates had returned to her hometown from the Canadian residential-school system in the 1970s stripped of a sense of self. They wore their jeans ripped and their hair long and black, touring the North free like “nomads,” according to Elisapie.
“They were so cool.”
Sugluk was inspired by Led Zeppelin. Elisapie’s trickling, autumnal version of Going to California (Californiamut) is a tribute to her uncle’s band and the bohemian era of the 1960s and 70s. “I’m beyond obsessed with that world,” says the mother of three. “I think I was born in the wrong era.”
Elisapie, like ABBA and Blondie, believes in the power of the disco ball.Leeor Wild/Supplied
Characterizing Going to California as the “heart of the record,” Elisapie easily identifies with the song about a woman who cries, sings, plays a guitar and “rides a white mare in the footsteps of dawn.”
As she explains, “I’m the singer, and I’m allowed to see myself in every song I sing. I’m definitely that girl with flowers in her hair.”
If Going to California is the heart of Inuktitut, the version of Blondie’s Heart of Glass (Uummati Attanarsimat) is the euphoric pulse. The song takes her back to the tiny hometown dance hall of her youth. “It felt like the wildest, crowded dance floor in the coolest club in the world,” she says. “When it was time to leave, the midnight sun was sublime.”
On social media, Blondie’s Debbie Harry congratulated Elisapie for the video to Uummati Attanarsimat and sent her a personal note as well. “It was sweet,” Elisapie says.
The hit from 1978 is not a happy song, lyrically – what was thought to be a gas turned out to be a heart of glass. But Elisapie, like ABBA and Blondie, believes in the power of the disco ball. In it she sees the reflection of the past but images of the present day too. And when she sings the “la-la-la” parts, no translation is required.
“I’m in my 40s,” she says. “I’m living the life I think I was meant to live, which is a miracle. I mean, how can anyone just sit there and let life go by?”
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