Pick a moment from Charlotte Cardin’s meteoric rise from Montreal songstress to global starlet—there are plenty of them. You could start with May 15, 2022. That was the night the 29-year-old took home four JUNO Awards for her album Phoenix—more than any other Canadian artist that evening, including The Weeknd, who had performed at the Super Bowl only a year earlier. Maybe you’d go with Apr. 14, 2013, when a teenaged Cardin reached the final four of Quebec reality TV singing competition La Voix. Maybe you’d land on June 26, 2022, when Cardin capped her 13th straight sold-out show at Montreal’s 2,300-capacity M Telus theatre. Or maybe you’d opt for Aug. 25, 2023, when the electro-pop sensation released her stunning sophomore album, 99 Nights. Come to think of it, you could probably settle on any one of 99 nights—and more—across Cardin’s early career. They seem to keep building upon one another. Effortlessly, too—the same way the singer-songwriter stacks her vocals.
A decade removed from the silky-voiced, bilingual pop star’s television debut, Cardin is indeed having a moment. Many of them. Few names in Canadian music come with the kind of cachet that she’s enjoying right now. Last month, the JUNO Awards announced that Cardin would perform as one of the headlining acts at the 2024 ceremonies in Halifax. Next week, she’ll perform a pair of sold-out shows at the Light House Arts Centre on Dec. 8 and 9. Mere months ago, she toured Paris, London and Munich. Thousands came to see the “Confetti” singer in Istanbul.
The warm reception has been “truly the most special thing ever,” Cardin says, speaking by phone with The Coast from her tour across Canada. “It’s just so exciting—and it’s also really encouraging to just keep writing music, and to tell honest stories.”
Here’s a story: Charlotte Cardin almost didn’t audition for La Voix (Quebec’s answer to The Voice) at all. A friend dared her to go, she told CBC Radio host Tom Power in 2022.
“At the time, it was the closest thing to professional music that I had ever been involved in,” she said. “I was 18. I had never auditioned for anything; I was still very shy about my music. I had no confidence—I had no idea that people wanted to hear me.
“I really saw it as a one-off. Like, ‘I’m just going to audition, and it’s a personal challenge.’”
She sang Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good.” Her vocal range and confidence turned heads: In Cardin, a glimpse of the late Back to Black singer’s ability to capture a room’s attention emerged. Maybe a little bit of Céline Dion, too—Cardin was “obsessed” with the Quebec chanteuse from the time she was young, she told CBC Music. She’d dog-eared the lyric booklet of Dion’s D’eux album.
“I would try to imitate her; I would want to be like her,” she added. “She’s the first concert that I’ve ever seen. She just really influenced me as a singer.”
Before Cardin knew it, she was competing in the reality show’s finale. She lost the competition—Valérie Carpentier won, with her performance of “À fleur de peau”—but won an audience of listeners across her home province. That included Sherbrooke-born French music star Pierre Garand (otherwise known as Garou), who recruited her to duet on his single “Du vent, des mots.”
Momentum built. By the time of Cardin’s debut EP, 2016’s Big Boy, with the singles “Like It Doesn’t Hurt” and “Dirty Dirty,” she’d caught the ear of Exclaim!, which called her work “a masterful display of songwriting,” with a voice that “evokes Amy Winehouse” and is “ready for bigger stages.” Her 2017 follow-up, Main Girl, earned Cardin a pair of JUNO nominations for “Breakthrough Artist of the Year” and “Songwriter of the Year.” (She lost to Jessie Reyez and Gord Downie’s collaboration with Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew.)
Bright moments, but there was room to grow. While both EPs reached #12 on Billboard’s Canadian Albums Chart, Cardin’s buzz was still mostly limited to Quebec. And some of her songs weren’t quite realized: In the same article Exclaim! praised Cardin’s voice, it deemed Big Boy’s title track “just a little too campy and out-of-time.” A year later, the Montreal Gazette wrote that her music “isn’t overly innovative, but it’s coolly current and packs a punch.”
How quickly those doubts would soon be erased.
If Cardin’s Big Boy and Main Girl EPs offered a glimpse of the Montreal singer’s potential, then it all came into view with 2021’s Phoenix. Over 13 songs and 45 minutes, she dazzled with an array of offerings that ranged from sparsely-ornamented, Kendrick Lamar-tinged pop records (“Phoenix”) to piano-driven anthems that evoked the best of Adele (“Anyone Who Loves Me”). Complex wrote that she sounded “ready to accept the responsibility” as the “voice of a generation.”
The difference, according to Cardin: She stopped trying to write what she thought people wanted to hear, and instead focused on what she wanted to say.
“I really tried to liberate myself from those preconceived ideas that I may have had before when I was writing music,” she tells The Coast. “I feel like more and more, I allow myself to just trust the process and try different things, and be playful with the music. And sometimes it sucks. And sometimes it’s really good.”
The songs resonated. Phoenix reached #1 in Canada and charted in Belgium, France and Switzerland. Cardin was invited to perform her single “Meaningless” at the 2022 JUNO Awards. And then, well, she cleaned up at the awards ceremony: Cardin’s haul of four wins—for “Album of the Year,” “Artist of the Year,” “Single of the Year” and “Pop Album of the Year”—topped the evening and put her in the same echelons as Nelly Furtado, Alanis Morrisette, Shawn Mendes, Drake and The Weeknd for single-year splashes.
It would set a lofty bar for her follow-up album. And send Cardin into a summer of torment.
When 99 Nights arrived at the end of August, it blew in like a summer storm: Hot and brooding and packed with colour. The album’s concept came from a summer spent in Montreal in 2021. At the time, Cardin was facing “a bit of an existential crisis,” she tells The Coast—in part from the weight of expectation following Phoenix, along with the difficulties of being in a long-distance relationship. (Cardin had relocated to France, while her partner, actor and singer Aliocha Schneider, still lived in Quebec.) On the album’s opener, the groovy and melancholic “Puppy,” Cardin writes of being pushed “over the edge” and “holding onto the ledge,” but feeling nonchalant about it: “Like a puppy out the window.” On the single “Jim Carrey,” one of Cardin’s most inspired songwriting feats yet, she’s at war with her “worthless ego” and confesses—to an imagined Carrey—that she’s been “thinking a little recklessly.”
“I was at a point in my life where I was a little bit confused and needed something to ground me… I was like, ‘Who am I? What do I want? Where do I fit?’” Cardin says. “And I think the creation of [99 Nights] is something that really, deeply grounded me in a lot of ways.”
In the case of “Jim Carrey,” Cardin had been having a conversation with her longtime producer, Jason Brando. The topic: How fear holds us back. (“It was kind of a big theme of my summer,” she tells The Coast.) Brando suggested she should look up the Truman Show actor’s interviews about ego when she got home from their writing session.
“I just fell into the vortex of these Jim Carrey speeches,” she says. “And the next day when I got to the studio, we decided to make the song about [me wanting] him to marry me in order to liberate myself from that ego.”
As pop songs go, it’s both clever and propulsive—the kind of songwriting that sets Cardin apart amongst her peers. (After its release, Carrey called Cardin to compliment the song.) And it’s in good company on 99 Nights: The Telegraph gave the album four out of five stars, calling it a “catchy introduction to a quality artist.”
That reception has translated to her live shows: In the past few months alone, Cardin has sold out shows from Vancouver to Paris. She even added a third date in Halifax (Mar. 23, 2024) to keep up with the demand sparked by December’s shows at the Light House Arts Centre. The JUNOs have invited her back: She’ll perform during the 2024 awards ceremony, along with The Beaches and Maestro Fresh Wes.
The whirlwind of it all isn’t lost on her.
‘Seeing people’s faces, hearing people sing songs that I wrote… it’s so great to see how music connects people,” she tells The Coast. “And not just my music, but music in general—how it brings people together.
“But knowing that my music can do that is truly the most special thing.”
