It’s a cool November afternoon when Salluit, Nunuvik-raised singer Elisapie Isacc arrives in Oakville, the tour stop before she travels to Kingston for her performance at the Kingston Grand Theatre on November 7, 2025 (https://kingstonlive.ca/show/743555/view). 

This stretch of concerts is off to a strong start after a performance in Markham, and it’s an especially exciting tour. In addition to tracks from her catalog of originals, Elisapie will be performing songs from her Juno Award-winning album Inuktitut, a record of ten rock and pop covers recorded in Inuktitut. Elisapie transforms songs like Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”, Metallica’s “The Unforgiven”, and Queen’s “I Want to Break Free” into something all her own, and on this tour audiences will have the chance to experience those songs first hand. 

A few minutes before setting up soundcheck at the Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts, Elisapie takes a moment to discuss the responsibility of a great cover, healing and connecting through music, and finding true Inuit songs in unexpected places. 

Q: In many ways, Nunavik and Salluit sound very deeply embedded in your music. Can you tell me a bit about how your roots in northern Quebec shape your music?

Elisapie: It's the music that we got to hear as children that are very much played on our local radio. Anything that was new, anything that was outside of our traditional music was very much brought to us by our local radio. And of course, our uncles that go to residential school would bring back their electric guitar… I think when we say we're very in tune with that music, that's not necessarily very different from any southerners or white people would listen to. Actually, we are very much in contact with that sort of North American contemporary music and we have always liked that because we are curious people.

And I think that's something that people tend to forget, that we are curious we are future forward. We like anything that's new. We take it and we just shake it all up and we make it our own. I guess that's how I see Nunavik music. And when we write songs…it's almost love songs to the land, because we're very one with the land, with the environment, and we don't really see us divided. We are constantly interacting, and we just team up with the land all the time. So I think it's a very unique way of writing music, and of course this album is very much about going back to memory… it was just important for me to just tell the story through these songs.

Q: I'm excited to talk a bit about Inuktitut because it's such a such an interesting record musically. These 10 songs are such beautiful and dramatic reimaginings that completely recontextualize these familiar pieces. What made you decide to take on that project? And how did changing the language impact your approach musically?

Elisapie: I feel like I'm starting to slowly not tour anymore and getting ready to hibernate and get into the artistic creative mode for the next album, and I feel so amazed and I feel like I have learned a lot from this record Inuktitut because I feel like I found my voice. I feel like I found this very sacred place. I feel things make more sense musically for me. And it's funny, because I went on this journey and also having very big songs that are very popular, that are so well made, was a huge responsibility to hold and interpret in a way that is going to feel personal and not just make a cover songs. It was such an almost scary experience, but I think trying not to over overstep these songs but making them my own was a unique experience.

Also I think learning about just trying to be true to myself, true in the moment, and true to the music, and not try to be cool, because that's an avenue that we could have taken. Say ‘let's just fucking have fun with these songs,’ and try to make bring them elsewhere… We just had to always remind ourselves to just be in the moment with the music, with the emotion, and that's going to be the most unique feeling. That’s something you can't write. You can't even say ‘I want to try to do this to a song’. We just had to be very connected to ourselves, and so that was a big learning experience for me and really trusting that creating and being in the moment is such a spiritual thing. And yeah having these very popular pop rock songs and bringing them to that space to the North… it feels so good. It feels so right. 

Q: There's something so profound about a lot of these covers. It may be almost cliché to say, but they don't feel like covers. They feel connected. I was especially struck by your version of Pink Floyd's “Wish You Were Here”. in a recent interview with NPR you described it as being “like a true Inuit song,” and that it was like you had already processed these songs. On the podcast occasionally comment that a song can sound like Kingston, but when we say that it's often in the context of a direct reference, where your version of “Wish You Were Here” felt so much more profound than that. What would you say makes a song into a true Inuit song?

Elisapie: It's when you forget the origin. You forget who it was written by. It just feels like the song was there in a very intimate form, reassuring you, talking to you the person singing. Being a friend to you where you could feel safe. This song was such an important song. I almost didn't want to perform it at the beginning or translate it because it felt so easy to do “Wish You Were Here”. Everybody does “Wish You Were Here”. Everybody knows “Wish You Were Here”, but I gave it a chance, and then going back and listening to it again to see if it struck something, and then all of a sudden I just collapsed and I just started crying, and I'm like, I can't just say it's a song that everybody liked and I shouldn't do it. It has a very personal meaning for me.

At times when we were young teenagers, really understanding why we're in a world of pain in the north. And why another cousin that commits suicide? Why the silence? Why the numbing ourselves? Why not talking about it? This song was always there, connecting us to our parents and uncles who couldn't really talk in the times when they should have. Residential schools, being divided from their fathers and mothers, and just feeling lost, being told one day there'll be doctors and lawyers and just life just not happening the way they were told it was going to be. So I think that song moves a lot of people because it connects me to them…there's a lot of layers. There's not one emotion. There's quite a few of them. So this song, it's our song. It's really our song. 

Q: I wanted to follow up on an interview you did not too long ago. You said that hearing a familiar song redone in an unfamiliar language helps to create curiosity and build personal alliances. Can you tell me just a little bit more about what you've meant by building personal alliances through music?

Elisapie: Music has such a good therapeutic drug for so many people who have gone through shock, who have gone through pain, who have gone through changes. I feel like it's something that really can connect us easier to people, to situations. It makes our hearts softer. I think using music and using the stage and talking to people that I would probably never have a chance to really connect with and have their hearts open. It's such a uniting force.

So in that sense, I'm very lucky. I would have a hard time just being a politician, although sometimes I feel like I am a politician in a way that everything I do is political. Everything we do, even if we don't want to, it's political. But imagine not having music and trying to get our rights, our thoughts and wisdom, coming from our culture across as something that everybody can consider. To share in their lives. I feel like it's so much easier. Like last night, in a place called Markham that I had really no idea where it was, and then all of a sudden feeling such an opening of people. There are some people crying, some people feeling compelled to tell their story, or to say they were moved. Of all ages. Imagine that power. It's so beautiful. 

Q: I love your comment about the sort of political nature of it it's almost like our art in many ways is almost inherently political because it incorporates meaning, it incorporates connection. And in the best of cases, it incorporates empathy as well. 

Elisapie: I think empathy is something that's become even harder nowadays. But I think when we know that someone is singing and delivering something from the heart, which is something I really try to stick to each night, every time, there's something so pure in that space that we have. There's no judgment, we are just fighting to make sure that we get every single person to connect with us. Even aside from music, just to deliver something that is an energy, and when that comes it's so much easier to really share things with people that may not share the same view on life but damn they are there enjoying the music and the performance. 

Q: Do you have any advice for young artists starting out in the industry, and specifically any advice for young indigenous artists?

Elisapie: I think in order to become an artist you need to have had a good foundation, a good place, even if it's not necessarily your home or the town where you grew up. A place where you feel a connection and welcome and where you have a safe space where you can really get your mind going, your thoughts going, your imagination going… I think sometimes it's places like Kingston, it's places like a small town in Quebec or for me in Kuujjuaq, where I moved for a year after I was in my small hometown.

I think sometimes you need to just hang out there and just explore and watch people and just learn how things roll in a community, in an environment, in your town, and just learn from it and be a good observer and not just think, oh, cool ideas and stuff like that happen in the big city…I think each place that you are is where you're meant to be, and where you're meant to be learning and connecting. That's so important when you become an artist, to really have a place where you can go in your mind that is something that forms you, that makes you who you are. 

And for indigenous artists, we are in a very special place right now where we finally are given that oxygen back where we can breathe and we can feel free. Where can we can take power to be whoever the hell we want to be, and I think we've been given that little space that's so square and that's so small, thinking this is who you guys are. But we are so diverse among one another, each artist, each nation. So imagine, that lack of imagination that people had over us that just didn't allow us to grow and to really explore. Now it's become a really fun place to just feel free. We've always been free, but at one point, something was taken away… I think we're just meant to inspire one another through our different genres, music exploration. It's so important, it's so healthy, so it feels good to be in that place.