JASMINE NETSENA

Music is Jasmine Netsena’s first language. From the age of five, the award-winning singer-songwriter, who is of the Tahltan and Dene Nations in Canada's subarctic, learned to sing from her grandparents in their Indigenous languages. Netsena’s music, rooted in love, loss and tradition, blends poetic storytelling with a soulful sound. 

 

Netsena’s first record Take You With Me was a personal journey built from her folk, blues and country music she was raised on, earning her the 2014 Aboriginal Peoples Choice Music Award for Best Folk/Acoustic Album and a nomination for Indigenous Songwriter of the Year from the Canadian Folk Music Awards. After a decade-long hiatus focused on family, Netsena’s forthcoming sophomore album comes with a fresh sound, shifting from roots-country to vintage soul. 

 

Part of this shift came stylistically, as Netsena switches from the roots-country of her debut into Bill Withers-esque vintage soul while retaining signatures of the past. “We’ve Forgotten” is an ode to lost times. “Even the wolves have changed,” Netsena sings on her latest single, “like all of us, they wait for the rain.” Silvery guitar lines and pedal steel drift around depictions of the effects of a mistreated planet and nature’s neglected needs - from overfishing to how Canadian springs have become fire seasons and smoky skies, because “we stopped listening.” From her work as a Truth and Reconciliation Commission story collector to tracking animals impacted by oil and gas development, Netsena’s narratives come with a depth of understanding.

 

Stepping into her soul style and the cultural space her grandmother saved for her, “Into My Power,” another new song, moves with a smooth and confident swagger, portraying Indigenous power and pride (“see them rise from smoke and flame,” she sings, “names changed but blood remains the same”) despite residential schools that tried “to break them,” she continues, “take them from their homes,” leaving children to live through so much alone. Netsena’s personal, poetic storytelling, sculpted for health and healing, is rooted in love, loss, joy and sadness, her homeland and traditions.

 

Netsena has been featured on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network’s Rising Stars, supported GRAMMY Award-winning Laurie Lewis, and won SOCAN’s 2018 Indigenous Songwriter of the Year Award. With her first new single in five years, recorded at Vancouver’s legendary Afterlife Studios (which has hosted acts from Led Zeppelin to Diana Ross and the Supremes), Netsena is preparing for a busy year ahead and is writing for her new record. This past year Netsena has performed as an official showcase artist at national and international industry conferences such as Iceland Airwaves, Folk Alliance International and BreakOut West.