Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Live Like The Sky

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg  musician,  writer and academic, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the boundaries between story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.

Live Like The Sky is an act of re-worlding, a record of struggle, a nuanced and complex shoreline combining a surprising influence from formative alternative musics with a vital Nishnaabe presence to create a fugitive and expansive space of relationship and affirmation.

Musically, Live Like The Sky draws directly from Simpson’s personal history, growing up in rural southwestern Ontario and discovering alternative music, punk, new wave, and goth through the static and poor reception of the distant alternative station broadcasting from Toronto; this music offered an escape from the ubiquitous country music and hard rock, offered difference, offered possibility; offered an otherwise. On previous albums, music was written to completed poetry, here Simpson inverts the process, writing lyrics and vocal lines to songs guided by those formative musical influences. It was a process of developing her own voice and sound. In the struggle to arrive at this artistic vision she credits Status/Non-Status and Zoon, as well as their collaborative Ombiigizi project, with finding the sound that lands in our present moment as both a rebellion and a homespace. As the material was workshopped and developed in studio with Jonas Bonnetta, Caylie Runciman, Ansley Simpson, Tanner Pare and Nick Ferrio, artistic decisions were labored over, and in the space between the aesthetics of the lyrics and the aesthetics of the music, Live Like the Sky was born, carrying the undercurrents of resistance alongside a celebration of (still) being here anyway. There was dancing in the studio during playback.

VISIT: leannesimpson.ca
Buy: bandcamp.com/live-like-the-sky

The album is the first new musical work from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson since her Polaris Music Prize short-listed Theory Of Ice in 2021, and joins a growing body of emergent creations from the Michi Saagiig Nishinaabeg writer, scholar, artist, including the recently published Theory Of Water: Nishnaabe Maps To The Times Ahead, the letter-exchange-as-manifesto Rehearsals For Living (with Robin Maynard), the novel Noopiming, and essay/lecture/collaboration with beavers, A Short History Of The Blockade. Present in all of these is a deep engagement and response to the world, the wild fire smoke, the genocides, the driving fascism.

vocals: leanne betasamosake simpson
back up vocals: nick ferrio, ansley simpson, jonas bonnetta, caylie runciman
song writing: leanne betasamosake simpson, jonas bonnetta, ansley simpson, caylie runciman, nick ferrio and steven lambke
guitars: jonas bonnetta, ansley simpson, caylie runciman, nick ferrio
bass: nick ferrio, caylie runciman, jonas bonnetta
drums and percussion: tanner paré, jonas bonnetta
keys and synths: jonas bonnetta, caylie runciman, ansley simpson
producer: jonas bonnetta, port william sound
mixing: graham walsh
mastering: heather kirby, dreamlands mastering
album art: malia osorio
layout: paul henderson