Playing God with Levity: Haley Blais on Authenticity and the Past

Zoom calls aren’t usually the common denominator when sleuth-ers crack a case wide open. It’s a bit more fieldwork and a bit more hassle; maybe they’re in a cave or a dusty library, flashlights to stalactites and boots to rocks. Still, in the rarest of situations, chatting face-to-face through a laptop screen is like picking a myth in bloom. It’s following footprints down an alleyway, rushing into knowledge to build a world around a world.

Last February, fresh off the release of her latest record Wisecrack, I sat down with Haley Blais and we sleuthed it out. In her music, the Vancouver-based singer-songwriter acts out narrative omnipotence with frequency and plays God with necessity. This artistic self-assurance made our casual conversation feel almost indulgent, almost sacred; nearly profane. Blais, however, the professional self-investigator that she is, was fueled by ease; Holding green tea in one hand and drinking a neon-yellow, filled-to-the-brim glass of something fizzy with the other, she indulged the angles of her life with a comedic breeze. 

Blais came up on YouTube, where she’s been uploading vlogs, thrift hauls, song covers, and music videos since 2013. The difference between her earliest upload (April Favorites 2013!) and her most recent (Haley Blais - Basement Apartment (Live)) is notable. Despite her more explicit turn to music-making, the singer hasn’t lost any sense of self. Comedy is still a tool for her – the humor found within her music conveys the awkward nature of working through the past and sharing one’s art with the world. When performing on tour, Blais uses this to embody her 2013 personality again. Taking inspiration from a comedian’s command of the stage, she adopts a laissez-faire lightness, noting that “whether or not anything is funny, I like to bring that energy.” While intending to keep this ethos, Blais adds that her upcoming Wisecrack tour dates will see the band more honed in on their musical craft, with more pressure put on their performances. 

This adoption of a more serious persona is a common theme in Blais’ career as of late. The artist’s sonic compositions and songwriting capabilities have flourished since her 2020 release Below the Salt, and she’s grown into a formidable force of lyricism and storytelling with a newfound polish. This growth occurred during Blais’ creative process (which she notes as “very scattered and very not-convenient”) for the latest record. While working through new tracks in the studio, the songwriter gained a concrete sense of control over her past, writing about it “so I could change it if I want to,” she remarks. Blais has also gained more control over her creative visions in the production realm. Regarding the process for Below The Salt, Blais explains: “I was learning to be more confident and more assertive of how I want the music to be executed and what my vision is. I’m trying to do better at that.” 

Producers David Vertesi and Jonathan Anderson helped with this; bringing an experimental approach into the studio, their guidance helped Blais highlight her desires for the record. Many of the songs on Wisecrack have hidden sonic elements, sometimes incorporating environmental samples: “There’s a lot of field recording aspects of me walking around. I would just walk in the gravel with a little microphone and kind of kick up dirt. There’s, like, me touching wood and stones” (very investigative of the artist). Blais notes this is inspired by her love for sensory stimuli: “I just really like up-close, textural, in your ear… I can’t go to sleep without listening to ASMR. [For] a lot of [samples]... you can’t even hear it but I know it’s in there, which I like. It’s like a little thing for me.” For the studio crew, humor and collaboration guided their process; every anecdote fit them snugly in the middle of an a-ha moment. For instance, Blais revealed that during a recording session for “The Cabin,” “We were finishing that song and I knew something was missing. As a joke I was like, let’s just slap some banjo on there… So as a joke, John was like, sure let’s do it. I like that the last thing we added to that weird, weird song was some really country-boy banjo. It really satisfies me whenever that banjo comes in.” A similar process occurred in the making of “Winner,” wherein Blais says they let their “freak flag fly,” ultimately leading to the song’s epic climax, in which the songwriter “let out some demons.”

Trekking deeper into the cave, what truly vibrates at the core of Blais’ creative mind is her strong connection to childhood. Wisecrack sees her bridging the gap across time as a form of working through her adolescent trauma. The songwriter’s newfound artistic control over her voice and background allowed her to take a unique narrative approach. Situated more firmly within herself, Blais “warp[ed] the memories” of her past, using an omnipotent voice to rewrite, reframe, and move forward. This is most notable in the record’s closing track, “Beginner’s Guide to Birdwatching.” Blais explains: “It’s a glimpse into [my brother] and I’s relationship before he had children and before our parents’ divorce and everything was okay in the world. I just picture us standing on the street that we used to walk on and being like, ‘Life’s pretty good, huh? Look at that bird, that’s nice. Nothing could go wrong and nothing could ever change.’ That’s where it’s placing you, which I think is interesting to put at the end of the album. It’s like back in time, but also in the future and also in the present. Very weird.… I feel like I’m kind of God, in a way.” On the record’s recently released deluxe album, “Somebody’s Son,” sees Blais using the same narrative technique: telling the story of her brother’s life, jumping through time, and narrating like this biblical, know-it-all figure. She sings, “When he's holding his daughter / He'll be missing his father / He was somebody's baby / And you're somebody's son.”

Regardless of whether she’s writing the truth, Blais says “it needs to feel authentic to me. It can’t just be what sounds good.” And the life a song takes on after its release is similarly healing. Blais loves hearing a listener’s connection to words that are uniquely tailored to her life. “It’s super personal and vulnerable but it will still be relatable to somebody else… Once I put anything out into the world it’s not really mine anymore, which I like.” Because the songwriter’s brain is so honed in on self-reflection, her songs feel continually intrinsic and rare; and with a growing audience and strong dedication, the artist is becoming a master of her craft. Though she’s musically “drained dry” after putting her all into Wisecrack, the album’s reception and Blais’ promising future make it all the more true that, as the singer says, “maybe I wasn’t just talking shit.”