Music is Jasmine Netsena’s first language. From the age of five, the award-winning singer-songwriter, who is of the Dene and Tahltan Nations, learned to sing from her grandmothers in their Indigenous languages. Netsena’s personal, poetic storytelling, sculpted for health and healing, is rooted in love, loss, joy and sadness, her homeland and traditions.
Netsena’s first record Take You With Me was a personal journey built from her classical vocal training and the 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. Of the Dene and Tahltan Nations, the Whitehorse, Yukon-based singer-songwriter’s forthcoming sophomore album comes after a decade-long hiatus that had her honing her vocal, guitar, and songwriting skills while embracing family and a fresh future. Motherhood instilled a sense of home unknown until then, becoming the bedrock inspiration for a major shift.
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 the yet-to-be-released track, “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.”
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 has been featured on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network’s Rising Stars and won SOCAN’s 2018 Indigenous Songwriter of the Year Award. With her first new single in five years coming soon, recorded at Vancouver’s legendary Afterlife Studios (which has hosted acts from Led Zeppelin to Diana Ross and the Supremes), Netsena is prepping for a busy year ahead including performances at BreakOut West in Saskatoon and Alaska’s Salmon Fest, the latter where she’ll tour for two weeks, before spending the fall finishing her new record.