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You won't be finding Elisapie Isaac bound to the world music section of your local bookstore. With music that is at war with itself in terms of sound and emotion, the next generation of music to come from the Arctic Circle is hardly as frigid as you might imagine. "Turning My Back" mixes breathy foreign vocals with catchy swells in the chorus that takes the song from being an homage to tradition to a reinvention of lore's transmission. After first being released in Canada, Elisapie's solo debut, There Will Be Stars, arrives in the States today.
In order to get an idea on her influences, one has to understand Elisapie's background. Half-Inuk and half-Newfoundland, she was adopted by an Inuit family and grew up in Salluit, Nunavik, in Quebec. Per a press release announcing her debut album's release in the United States, Elisapie shared her perspective on growing up in The Great North:
For Elisapie, the North is not the top of the world but the center of her world. “My grandfather used to say that to avoid getting lost,” she says, “you always have to look to where you’ve come from.”
Elisapie is never lost when it comes to her music as she blends the cultures that surround her into a sound that is at once folk and her wintry version of pop. You can expect to hear a lot of words you won't understand, seeing as almost half of her album is sung in Inuit, with another track, "Moi, Elsie," in Canadian French. In 2003, she directed and starred in a documentary on her Inuit roots titled Si le temps le permet, which roughly means "if time permits." It's tragically in Inuit with French subtitles, or French with no subtitles, so us English-speakers will have to suffice with Elisapie and her hometown's beauty.
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