Music is medicine for Shawnee Kish, the Juno nominated artist whose sophomore EP Revolution dropped on October 20.
Ahead of its release and a career-defining performance at the Drake Underground, Kish sat down with Now Toronto to discuss her latest work.
Kish is a two-spirit, Indigenous performer originally from Welland, Ontario, now based in Fort Erie, whose kinship with music began as far back as she can remember.
The term two-spirit refers specifically to Indigenous people who identify with any number of gender variances, sexual preferences, spiritual traits and roles within their communities.
Kish told Now that as a young person, she struggled to reconcile the conflicting elements of her character, but was always able to seek refuge through music; today she attributes her deep-rooted sense of self to its grounding qualities.
“My relationship with music I think started when I was born, ” Kish recalls with a giggle, “it was always playing in the house,” she said. “I use music as a form of healing and medicine for myself and hopefully for other people,” she added, in reference to her recently released project.
“I gravitated towards music, and I gravitated towards instruments, but it wasn’t until my younger teenage years when I was struggling with my identity as a two-spirit person, as a native person, that I used it to propel myself out of that time,” she recalled.
As a child, Kish used to fall asleep to classical music at night and would keep it playing until she went to school the next morning. It was also a genre she enjoyed playing as she tinkered with her own sound, and her love of sweeping orchestral interludes would soon become a vessel for her own empowerment.
As she matured, Kish became heavily influenced by the work of powerhouse female vocalists like Eta James, but recalls her affiliation for Melissa Etheridge particularly fondly, and with a hint of nostalgia.
As a teenager Kish was grateful to have an out and proud artist to look up to. Soon her admiration for Etheridge morphed into a love for the melodious charm of Nina Simone and Canadian-American icon, Buffy St.Marie.
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Their lasting impact lives in plain sight, not just in Kish’s eyes when she mentions their names, but in the cadence of her voice and with every track on Revolution.
Ahead of her second EP’s fall release, Kish dropped a number of singles off the album in relatively quick succession, each one distinct in message and measure, sustained by an overarching motif of inner conflict and her on-going search for peace of mind.
Revolution dropped on October 20, and is available to stream on Apple Music and Spotify.
