The evolution of Lucie Idlout

Besides performing on her own, with guitarist Jonny James, Lucie Idlout reunited with former members of the all-female group, Uber Hussy, during a January concert at Toronto’s Tranzac club in support of Liliany Obando, an indigenous activist imprisoned in Columbia. Here she shares a smile and a hug with fellow Uber Hussy Nancy Dutra. (PHOTO BY JOHN BIRD)

TORONTO — Lucie Idlout had to throw up before taking the stage to perform three songs at Toronto’s Tranzac club earlier this month.

It was a case of nerves, pure and simple, as she sweetly admitted to the audience.

It may seem strange to think of a tough, hard-rocker like Idlout suffering from nerves, especially in front of a small, supportive crowd in a venue where she played many Sundays early in her 12-year career.

After all, she has performed for far larger crowds – like when she opened for the White Stripes in Iqaluit, or for international star Buffy Ste. Marie in Ottawa.

But the Tranzac gig meant a lot to her, Idlout told the audience, because it had a political purpose that was also intensely personal.

The concert, which featured a number of performers, was a fundraiser for Liliany Obando, a human-rights activist from Colombia who has been held in detention in her home country since July 2008.

Obando is currently being tried for “rebellion” – which in her case means working for a farmers’ union in Colombia.

Idlout spent a couple of weeks travelling and performing with Obando and others back in 2006, when the activist toured Canada’s east coast to raise awareness of the Colombian indigenous peasants’ plight.

“She and I made a connection because we share an indigenous heritage,” Idlout said in an interview before the show. And later on the stage, she added that Obando is: “a woman who speaks for the hurting. She takes care of her people. She’s a woman I look up to.”

The concert was a fitting kickoff to 2010 for this passionate, raw-voiced Inuk singer who once thought her future lay in politics rather than music, in fighting for a better life for her own people.

She had been doing some performing, she recalls, but never expected to make a career of music.

But that all changed when the Native Women’s Association of Canada asked her to perform at the Museum of Civilization.

Idlout still has no trouble calling up the exact date: June 21, 1998, National Aboriginal Day. “I didn’t even have a band,” she said.

For Idlout, who calls both Iqaluit and Toronto home, and has been performing ever since, 2009 was a banner year.

She kicked it off in February with the release of Swagger, her hard rocking second album which was well received by both critics and the public.

November was a high point when she performed before a sell-out crowd at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards in Hamilton’s Copps Coliseum.

She was nominated for awards in four categories there, including best music video for Whiskey Breath, best female artist and best songwriter. She took home the award for the Best Rock Album of the Year, for Swagger.

Entirely written in Toronto, after a year-and-a-half struggle with writer’s block, Swagger was Idlout’s attempt to put out a mainstream rock album she considered “culture free – so the southern media will understand that Inuit are not restricted by other people’s perceptions, by what they think we should do.

“I wanted to surprise people; take away the stereotypes.”

The CBC also came through for Lucie Idlout in 2009. In April the “mother corp” filmed her doing an acoustic performance of her song, Tonight, while riding a “red rocket” streetcar through downtown Toronto. You can view the video at: http://bit.ly/7nmH1C

Listeners to CBC Radio 2 also picked Lucie to represent Nunavut in the Great Canadian Song Quest.

CBC also commissioned her to write and perform a song about Iqaluit’s Road to Nowhere.

She joined performers like Oh Susanna, Chantal Krevaziuk, Hawksley Workman, Martha Wainwright, Kim Barlow and Hey Rosetta!, each writing and singing about a place in their own home province or territory.

A complete concert of all 13 musicians performing their regional compositions was filmed in December, and will be broadcast starting this week (Jan. 21) in a variety of CBC venues, including internet podcasts.

See Lucie’s web page for details: http://bit.ly/4Jb0gB.

Last year also saw Idlout composing and recording a score for a 2010 Isuma Productions film on climate change and Inuit traditional knowledge.

She also acted as production manager on the documentary, which features Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro.

“When I write I always use a guitar, but this was really different for me,” Idlout said. “I started by building a drum loop, which inspired the melodies. So there was no guitar at all.”

Though the final music features a full rock drum kit, she said, it’s not rock based, but rather “cultural and spiritual in some ways, with bits of traditional melody.”

“I like to think I’m always evolving.”

If all the above doesn’t make it obvious that Idlout has put her writer’s block far behind her, consider what she has on tap for 2010.

After Swagger got underway with Whiskey Breath, the first song she composed for that album, “I never stopped writing,” she said.

Right now, she has 10 song titles listed for her third album, which she hopes to begin recording this March.

She’s already written songs to go with four of the titles, as well as a few earlier songs “in the vault.” She’s looking forward to the next six.

When recording gets underway, Idlout will lay down as many tracks as she can, then choose the best 10 for the album, she said.

This is another step in her evolution as a songwriter. Until now now, titles were the last thing she wrote, after both melody and lyrics.

But this time the titles came first, and are leading development of the songs.

Before going into the studio for the next album, though, Idlout has some more film work lined up with Isuma back home in Nunavut.

“I’ll be going to a sealing camp outside Iqaluit,” she said. “We’ll have elders mentoring us and we’ll be teaching young people how to deal with seal skins.”

The idea is to film the whole event, and include story-telling and how-to segments to insure this vital part of the culture is preserved.

And as if that were not enough, Idlout has also begun fundraising for a film project of her own, one very close to her heart.

“I want to travel to all the Baffin communities and sit down with as many elders as I can to record their traditional songs with them,” she said. “I want to make both a CD and a film, to preserve these songs before they’re lost.”

For Idlout, “music is where my heart is. But I can’t take the culture out of my life, either.”

So working with Isuma on cultural stories while writing, recording and performing music too, should make for a just about perfect 2010 for this determined Inuk artist.