Arielle Soucy Finds Freedom in the Wake of Grief on the Poignant 'Passages'

It feels inaccurate, even reductive, to describe Arielle Soucy as a mere folk artist. The Quebec singer-songwriter — who lists free jazz and ambient music as key inspirations — seems less interested in upholding the conventions of that often staid genre than basking in the freedom of her creative impulses. Moving between French and English, Soucy’s best songs balance a rustic warmth with an almost proggy experimentalism: melodies that swerve in unexpected directions, twirling layers of vocals that congeal into strange and uncanny harmonies.

“I like music that doesn’t resemble anything else,” Soucy tells me, raising her voice above the din of a rambunctious vegan cafe in Montreal’s La Petite-Patrie neighbourhood, where we seek refuge from the frigid cold of a January afternoon. “I like when music makes me go, ‘what the fuck is that?’”

That’s not to say that her music is inaccessible. Soucy’s acclaimed 2023 debut album, Il n'y a rien que je ne suis pas, brimmed with playful and expansive songwriting, and earned her a spot on the Polaris Music Prize long list. A year later, inspired by a “burst of creativity,” she released the EP Future is Bright / Beautiful Sights, a colourful and daring detour into psychedelic freak folk.

On her sophomore record, Passages — which arrives via Bonbonbon Records on March 27th — Soucy wades into heavier territory. Written following the death of her father, her new songs are both poignant and painterly, tackling themes of grief and spiritual discovery while further expanding her sonic palette.  

“Donnez-moi une autre tête, donnez-moi un autre corps, je suis fatiguée d’essayer d’avancer”

(“Give me another head, give me another body, I'm tired of trying to move forward”) she repeats on the album’s hymn-like lead single “Pattern,” her voice lifted heavenward by the warmly sonorous chords of a pipe organ. 

“This album is like a blanket,” Soucy explains. “I wanted to make something warm and round, something you can put on and—” she closes her eyes, and gives herself a hug, sighing deeply.

Soucy was born and raised in Brébeuf, a tiny, bucolic village tucked along the Rouge River near Mont-Tremblant. And though she has spent most of her adult life based in Montreal, her music feels tethered to her rural upbringing; her songwriting animated by a longing for the simple freedoms of the countryside, an escape from the weighty expectations of city life.

“Sometimes I think I’m a genius / For looking at flowers,” she sings on “Il n'y a rien que je ne suis pas,” the lilting title track from her debut. “Sometimes I think I am dumb / For spending so much time being empty.” 

“I always miss the country,” Soucy tells me earnestly. “My family is there, and my nephews. I love to garden. The big city can be too much sometimes.”

That sense of yearning — a craving for weightlessness, the relinquishing of control — persists on Passages, a collection of songs that Soucy first began working on in 2021, while studying composition and religion at Concordia University.

“I was in a bit of a spiritual phase,” she explains. “My dad had just died, and something just unlocked in me.”

Soucy started listening to gospel and other spiritual music, and began singing in a church. Suddenly, she “became obsessed” with the pipe organ, that marvelously old-fashioned instrument rarely used in contemporary recordings, but which came alive each Sunday at the St. Matthias Anglican Church in Montreal.

After convincing the clergy to let her make use of the organ, Soucy composed and recorded a series of samples, around which she crafted songs like “Pattern,” imbuing them with a somber, but heavenly texture, like pale light softly refracted through stained glass.

Passages was also influenced by experimental, jazz-inflected artists like Louis Cole, Sun Ra, and The Vernon Spring. To record the songs, Soucy recruited guitarist Marcus Lowry, double bassist Sophie Brubacher and percussionist Stratsimir Dimitrov, and encouraged the band to express themselves through musical improvisation. “I wanted the album to sound super organic, and even more rustic than my earlier work,” she says.

The result is a dynamic and unpredictable collection of songs, inspired by what Soucy describes as a “toss everything at the wall” approach. 

Between spiritual bookends “Pattern” and “Passage,” there’s the windingly unique “Nid de vie”; followed by “Varieties of Quiet,” a gentle, melancholy meditation on finding faith in the face of adversity, its lyrics borrowed from the late American poet Christian Wiman. “I find it liberating to write using other people’s work,” she says. “It reminds me that nothing is mine.”

And then there’s “How To Be Me,” a honeyed love song about finding the courage to carry on, or the faith to let go. “Teach me baby, how to be me  / An ever changing melody,” she sings in a bright falsetto.

The album, she says, is “a testimony that all things pass. Even if it’s hard to believe sometimes, even if it takes a long time, things will turn.”