Parallel World
How I made the Polaris Prize winning album
My new album Parallel World is out now! Around this time a year ago, the idea of making a new album was far from my mind. I was under lockdown here in Toronto during the early part of the pandemic and everything about life felt uncertain. Touring stopped. I was scared to leave the house. Thinking back to that time, there was an uncanny quality to day-to-day life. Was this really happening? I had just been at the Banff Centre where things felt relatively normal until suddenly they weren’t. Hand sanitizer stations started springing up around the centre but back then, no one was wearing masks yet. I borrowed one from my friend Peggy for the flight home.
Last spring, I reflected a lot on the past. I started writing a book about my career. I had time to think back to when I first started making music. Rapping at open mic nights in Edmonton as a teenager. Making beats in my mom’s attic. Dropping out of university to follow my dream. Combing through all those memories, I realized that being under lockdown wasn’t so different from the circumstances that inspired my first album. It felt like I was back at my mom’s house again: researching music, nerding out, going down internet wormholes and eventually, creating my own personal language for communicating with the world.
When I was younger, I was an early adopter of online platforms. During last year’s forced second childhood, I had a chance to catch up with the changing media landscape after a few years of tour-based neglect. I started my Bandcamp page in May (!), this newsletter in October and a Twitch account this January. Tending to these new outlets, writing my book and going for jogs up to the 401 in the grey stillness of Canadian spring was my life.
When I heard about Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, I thought, “That could have been me.” I started to jog with him in mind. Breonna Taylor made me think about my two sisters. George Floyd was a rapper. In the Summer of 2020, it felt like an unrelenting wave of dread was rising above me like a tidal wave, a surging torrent of black pain. But the weirdest part was that it didn’t feel lonely. In fact, far from it.
After the paywall, read on for the books, albums, TV shows and experiences that helped me create this Polaris Prize-winning album.
