Aysanabee isn’t superstitious, but these days he’s having a hard time chalking some things up to mere coincidence. Fresh off an Australian tour, the two-time JUNO Award-winner from Sandy Lake First Nation is embarking on his first headlining trip across eastern Canada. It’s a big moment for the Oji-Cree singer-songwriter, who had a banner year in 2024: His breakout EP, Here and Now, nabbed the barrel-voiced baritone a pair of awards for Songwriter of the Year and Alternative Album of the Year at last year’s JUNO Awards. Now, the multi-instrumentalist finds himself coming back to Halifax—site of those JUNOs, coincidentally—as part of a seven-show Nova Scotia leg on his two-month, 23-city tour from February until late March. And to ask Aysanabee, it’s got his late grandfather’s fingerprints all over it.
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Moon shots and surf spots
Raised in the small community of Kaministiquia outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Aysanabee’s path to artistry was already a fate-filled one. Years before he would tour Australia with folk singer Kim Churchill, playing to packed festival crowds, he nearly died: He broke through the ice while snowshoeing across a river in the far reaches of Northern Ontario. It was February. Minus-40 degrees. He was working a job staking claims on land that could be mined, and he’d travelled in by bush plane and snowmobile to reach the site. He was alone. As the ice cracked beneath his feet, the water started to pull at his snowshoes and pants.
“I knew if I went under, I was too weighed down to swim,” he told a crowd at Halifax’s Rebecca Cohn Auditorium on Nov 12, 2023. “And I wasn’t sure I’d be able to punch my way through the ice.”
Aysanabee had an axe with him. He stuck it into the ice and pulled himself across, then snowshoed his way back to safety. As he fought for survival, he whispered a prayer.
“I was promising to myself and a higher power that if I got through that moment, I would go play music.”
As a pre-teen, Aysanabee had taught himself to play his older brother’s guitar. He and his mother lived in an off-grid trailer with no electricity.
“We had big plans to renovate it, but could just never catch a break. We were pretty much always broke,” he told The Coast last March.
He went to school in Thunder Bay. When he’d visit his friends who had electricity and internet access at home, they’d watch YouTube videos of guitarists. Kathy Kane. Justin King. Erik Mongrain—“all these insane guitar players,” Aysanabee says, whose techniques he’d try to learn. Somewhere along the way, he stumbled across the videos of a blond, barefooted artist from Canberra, whose fingers flicked up and down the guitar frets as naturally as rain tapping at a trailer window. That artist’s name? Kim Churchill.
Flash forward to 2025, and after a last-minute DM last May—Churchill was in Gatineau, Quebec, and needed an opener for his show; Aysanabee offered to fly there—the two artists became friends. Churchill invited Aysanabee to join him on tour in Australia in January. It still feels serendipitous, Aysanabee says.
“In a way, like, Kim kind of taught me how to play guitar via the internet,” he tells The Coast, “and here I am, on the other side of the world, sharing stages with him.”
The two toured across Tasmania, “vanlifing it” for two weeks and playing shows in between surf sessions off the shores of the lush and mountainous island state. The “breathtaking” surroundings offered Aysanabee a reset from a busy 2024: In the previous 12 months, he’d played more than 100 shows in seven countries, going from Los Angeles to the UK, then back to Canada—“singing across the country through blizzards and whiteouts,” he wrote on Instagram—before hopping back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean for festivals in Europe, the US and Canada. The time also offered Aysanabee a chance to try something new: Making a “daily practice” of reflecting on what he’s grateful for.
“Sometimes it’s definitely easy to get into negative mindsets,” he says, “and I think purposely and intentionally reflecting… even if it’s just the things you’re grateful for that morning. Like, ‘I had a really good breakfast.’
“I think that’s a healthy mindset to get into.”
A place at the table
As Aysanabee stood on-stage at the Scotiabank Centre last March, JUNO Award in hand, a memory came to him. It was of his grandfather, Watin, and a conversation they’d had a year earlier while Watin was on his deathbed. The two had been close: The elder had inspired the singer-songwriter’s first album, which started as a series of phone calls between the two during the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns. (Watin lived in Thunder Bay; Aysanabee had moved to Toronto.) In the midst of tours and recording sessions, Aysanabee “dropped everything” and went to visit his grandfather one last time. Not that Watin made the visit easy on him.
“He was like, ‘Why are you here?’” Aysanabee recalls. He tried reassuring his grandfather that he was there to spend time with him. “And he just kind of grabbed me. He said, ‘I want you to do the things that you say you’re going to do.’”
Those words returned to Aysanabee as he addressed the crowd in Halifax that night, thanking the Indigenous women who “opened the door for me” and promising to “try and rip those hinges off” for the next wave of Indigenous artists. Was he living up to his grandfather’s last words? He wasn’t quite so sure.
The thought lingered as Aysanabee planned his first headlining tour across eastern Canada. Soon, an idea dawned: He would encourage Indigenous artists to send him their music on social media, then invite a different Indigenous performer to open for him on every stop of the tour. For a group of artists who have, historically, “been very much excluded from being at the table of the music industry,” he says, the gesture felt like a step toward something new. It would go beyond “bringing them on-stage and showing communities what great artists are in their own cities,” he adds.
“It’s about spending time and amplifying them… it’s about just being with them and having a coffee, like, ‘Where are you at in your music career? What are your hopes and dreams?’”
He’s been excited to announce the tour’s openers so far. Odanak First Nation singer-songwriter Mimi O’Bonsawin and Inuit throat-singing duo Silla will join Aysanabee in Ottawa, and Mi’kmaw rapper Wolf Castle will take the stage with Aysanabee in Fredericton. Anishinaabe pop singer Natasha Fisher will join his Toronto show.
“I’m just grateful for people wanting to share space,” Aysanabee says, “and I’m grateful to be able to do it.”
He’s still looking for Indigenous artists who can join him at his Halifax show. To share the stage with a room full of talent in the same city where he won a pair of JUNOs? Now that would feel like more than a coincidence.
Aysanabee will perform at the Marquee Ballroom on Thursday, Mar 13. Tickets are available online, starting at $34.55.
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This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2025.