IN CONCERT
Royal Wood with Elisapie Isaac
When: Sunday, 7 p.m.
Where: St. Ann's Auditorium
Tickets: $20 at Lyle's Place, Ditch Records and ticketweb.ca
The spring thaw always makes Elisapie Isaac homesick.
It's been 13 years since the Inuk singer-songwriter left Sal-luit, a small community near the northernmost coast of Quebec, just 10 kilometres inland from Hudson Strait.
The community of just over 1,300 is nestled in a valley between modest-sized mountains, a middle point between Nunavik's 14 communities. Its members endure nearly all-dark winters in exchange for summer daylight that stretches across weeks.
"It's a very physical feeling," Isaac said on the phone from Regina, part of her cross-Canada tour supporting Toronto pop singer-songwriter Royal Wood.
"It's hard, it's cold and we feel isolated, but that's our environment. I think when spring arrives, we're sort of back to feeling free again."
Salluit has been a regular muse for Isaac. Her debut solo album was called There Will Be Stars - a nod to her grandfather, who would look to the sky as a navigation tool. Follow-up Travelling Love, set for release Oct. 30, also includes a melancholic love song called Salluit. Between Inuktitut verses, Isaac sings:
"Far away place / Under the midnight sun / Through the valley / I see the horizon / Where I'm from."
There's no place like home to stir the creative juices.
Born to an Inuk mother and a Newfoundlander father who was a Hudson Bay Company manager, she was given as a gift, in the Inuk tradition, to her grandmother's cousin, who raised her.
She started playing music with her brother and then sang backup in her uncle's folk band, which she says felt like singing for the Beatles.
After a pause of several years when she worked providing social services for kids, she re-entered the creative realm.
First it was film - in 2000, she hosted Peoples of the Circumpolar, a documentary that visited communities in northern Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Norway and Siberia.
Three years later, she produced her own documentary about modernization and the future of Inuit culture, called If the Weather Permits.
She returned to music to form a duo with Alain Auger called Taima, which won the 2005 Juno Award for best Aboriginal Recording of the Year. But she says she always felt more free doing solo work.
Travelling Love isn't all about her past, though - it also represents her present. Songs like It's All Your Fault are reminders of recent scenes in her life, like sitting in a kitchen and listening to Leonard Cohen.
There's also a distinctive, syn-thy Montreal sound to the album. That's due in part, no doubt, to the work of a collaborative team that includes producers Ãloi Painchaud and Françis Lafontaine (Karkwa), Brad Barr (The Slip, Barr Brothers), Robbie Kuster and Simon Angel (both part of Patrick Watson's band), multi-instrumentalists Manuel Gasse and Gabriel Gratton, as well as Jim Corcoran, who helped Isaac with the lyrics, given that English is her third language.
When Isaac first moved to Montreal, she told an interviewer that she felt the heavy weight of representing Inuit peoples to the people she met in the city.
Every conversation was like Anthropology 101. But that's changed.
"I think I've come to terms with myself, with my identity, my choices," she said.
"I'm very happy in my life and I think I'm more mature now. So I don't have to feel like I have to sort of try and be this girl who says the right things because I'm being looked at as an Inuk girl.
I'm feeling much more free."
