Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s music is an act of re-worlding, a record of struggle, a nuanced and complex shore combining a surprising influence from formative alternative music with a vital Nishnaabe presence to create a fugitive and expansive space of relationship and affirmation. Simpson’s latest album Live Like The Sky joins a growing body of emergent creations from the Michi Saagiig Nishinaabeg writer, scholar, artist, including the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for non-fiction winner, Theory Of Water, the letter-exchange-as-manifesto Rehearsals For Living (with Robin Maynard), and the Dublin literary prize short-listed Noopiming. Present in all of these is a deep engagement and response to the world, the wild fire smoke, the genocides, the driving fascism.

Musically, Live Like The Sky draws directly from Simpson’s personal history, growing up in rurally and discovering alternative music, punk, new wave, and goth through the static and poor reception of the distant alternative station broadcasting from the city; this music offered an escape from the ubiquitous country music and hard rock, offered difference, offered possibility; offered an otherwise. 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.

“In a fraudulent world of misused traditions and teachings it’s so compelling and refreshing to see honesty and truth have a place in our guilt ridden colonial grant system. Not only am I blown away by this human being as an artist but the music she surrounds herself with always cuts so deep into any empathic teenage heart. This record contains the beauty of stories and words that will help the teaching of what so many of us don’t understand. Once again Leanne has made a stunning album”  Kevin Drew, Broken Social Scene