Oji-Cree singer-songwriter Aysanabee, who was born Evan Pang. Returning to his real name as his music career took shape wasn’t so much a pivot as a correction, he says.Lindsay Duncan/Supplied
On a bright Tuesday morning at a Universal Music office in Toronto, Aysanabee is talking about a recent vacation.
He’s running through the details with his publicist: flight times, the heat, the ease of being somewhere else for a bit. His hair slips forward, and he moves it back almost absent-mindedly, like it’s something he’s done a thousand times.
It’s a gesture I recognize from more than a decade ago, when we were both journalism students at Toronto’s Centennial College. Back then, he was still Evan Pang.
The name Aysanabee came later. It’s how I, and everyone else, now know the Oji-Cree singer-songwriter from the Sucker Clan of Sandy Lake First Nation in Ontario. Aysanabee became the first Indigenous artist to win the Juno Award for Songwriter of the Year in 2024 and today is a widely recognized voice in Canadian music.
With Timelines, his new six-track acoustic EP set for release April 10, his music returns to its most honest form, much like the name he now carries in the open. But it wasn’t always that simple.
Aysanabee is finding his voice as he adapts to his new star status
His mother, an Anishinaabe woman, chose his English name as a form of protection. “My last name should have been Aysanabee,” he says. “She changed it on the birth certificate. She just thought it’d be easier in life for me to have that name.” To her, easier meant safer, and it got him through.
“It kind of felt like we had to blend in, and hide this piece of yourself … this part of yourself that can be dangerous,” he says.
That feeling followed him to Toronto. When he arrived from Northwestern Ontario, he began to face questions about his identify. “There’s definitely a difference between being an Indigenous person in rural communities and being an Indigenous person in metropolitan cities,” he says. In those college classrooms, people would ask, what are you? “I was just kind of like, oh, here we go,” he says through laughter. “Then I was like, oh yeah, I’m Oji-Cree.”
Returning to his real name as his music career took shape during the pandemic wasn’t so much a pivot as a correction. He describes it as “taking a piece of yourself back, and having pride in that.”
It takes only a few listens to hear how much of Aysanabee’s work is built from his own history – family, memory, voices that existed long before the recording.
Watin, the 2022 album that first brought him wider attention, gave way to Here and Now (2023), and with it the Juno for songwriter of the year and a sense that something had shifted and wasn’t shifting back. The pressure didn’t just come from the attention; it was everything else, too: the comparisons and slow creep of measuring himself against everything around him. “That’s such a poisonous place to put yourself in,” he says.
After all, the songs weren’t just his any more. Once they were out in the world, they carried other people, too – narratives that had to be handled carefully, or not at all.
“These were heavy stories,” he says, thinking about how residential-school survivors might hear them. “I was worried … is this going to retraumatize someone?”
At the root of Aysanabee’s music are two interwoven influences. One is lineage: the accounts carried through his family, his grandfather’s voice.
The other is the practice that taught him how to hold them: reporting, with its insistence on listening, asking the right questions and waiting just long enough for something real to surface.
“It was the journalism that made me start interviewing my grandfather,” he adds, a path shaped in part by his grandmother nudging him toward postsecondary school. “I thought I should record these conversations and save these stories.”
But the profession also has its limits in the world of art. Music gave him somewhere else to go: He could step inside the story instead of standing beside it.
On Timelines, he leans into a stripped-down version of his music, often just a guitar and his voice. In the early days of his career, this is how he often performed live because hiring a full band wasn’t always financially possible. Timelines lets readers enjoy this version of his music whenever they want.
As our discussion winds down, a question about balance comes up: How he decides what to hold on to and share.
He takes a moment.
“I think it’s important for us to share pieces of ourselves,” he says. “If it maybe makes people accept pieces of themselves.”