Image of Cassia Hardy (left) and CJSW Interviewer Brooklyn Billinghurst (right).
Cassia Hardy performed during Sled Island on Friday, 5:40pm at Ship & Anchor & Saturday, 1:30pm at Eighty-Eight Brewing (Parking Lot).
TRANSCRIPT:
Cassia
This is Cassia Hardy speaking.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
Thank you, Cassia. Thank you so much for coming in and having the time to talk to me. I appreciate it. So I did research to prepare for this interview. And I love what you told Exclaim! magazine about the creation of Cassia Hardy being separated from Wares and your identity in Wares and the soul searching you did in 2022, three years on, how do you feel about that direction you’ve taken?
Cassia
Yeah, I mean, it’s the path that I’m on. I am a pretty sentimental, nostalgic person, in a way, and I do feel like it’s important for growth’s sake to learn not to look back as often I’m making the sounds that I’m making right now. I when I’m on stage, I’m thinking in microseconds, it’s just what’s in front of me, what my fingers want to do. Yeah, I’m very thankful for the reception to the music. It’s easy to feel like when something like wares goes away, that maybe people’s attention might shift in a permanent way, and like, that’s fine, but that hasn’t happened. So I’m just so grateful, and it’s been really helping me. It’s been really invigorating.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
I bet, yeah, that’s beautiful. How do you define the Wares-Cassia? Like, if you could sum that person up in one word.
Cassia
The Wares-Cassia? One word, hyphenated, pre therapy, okay, intense.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
Is this like a little bit of like the butterfly out of the chrysalis on this project then?
Cassia
Oh, maybe, I mean, that’s so funny. That’s usually a trans thing, but it’s like, it’s just a constant. It’s a constant clawing out of the cocoon. You know, every time you think you’re done, you just see, I think of my friend Rae Spoon, who says there’s always something new to come out about, you know.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
Yeah, always covered in cocoon goo.
Cassia
That’s right.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
Coming out again and again and again and again.
Cassia
That’s how I feel.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
Yeah, that’s beautiful. And you chatted with Rae Spoon at Shelf Life earlier. How did that go?
Cassia
That was, oh yeah. It was great. It was, like, the first thing I did for Sled, I feel like, crashed landed at my friend’s beautiful place and walked over to Shelf Life and had a chat. And Rae is someone that I really feel comfortable saying that my album in relation like it wouldn’t look anything like it does without Rae Spoon and their work, writing and collaborating on graphic novels and their work with Ivan Coyote, yeah, they’re like a totally singular, multidisciplinary force and such a great singer, such a great perspective, like such a beautifully honed sensitivity that you just feel radiating off of them in their work and their drive to just look at like alternative ways of existing in this so called industry, but in this community, and they’re like, contributions to the cultural conversation, like, they’re so important to me, and to get the chance to call them a friend and, like, just get to visit the way that we do. Like, yeah, it was a really beautiful opportunity, and I’m very thankful for it.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
I’m glad you got to have that opportunity. Those community building moments are really important, I think for, I always think to like the younger queer people, the fact that they can look up and be like, ‘Oh, beautiful. These people are always coming out of their cocoons, the way I am.’
Cassia
It’s just a, it’s a lineage, right? I’m happy to be like, a part of it. And Rae, and then it goes back even further, across decades, across disciplines, like, yeah, we’ve been out here. Like, you can find us.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
We’ve been here. Yeah. So listening to some tracks from in relation, particularly to “Houses” and “Empress,” which are beautiful songs, it’s clear that your songwriting has what I call a compass. It points to a certain region a certain place. Could you expand on the role that location plays in your lyrical storytelling?
Cassia
So for me, I view songwriting as a response and musicianship as a lifelong response to stimuli, like as opposed to maybe how the government thinks about it, which is one’s lifelong struggle to become an export ready product. And for me making art, it’s like, it’s a sense, you know, it’s like breathing. You take in information and you process it. And when I think about what I would really like to engage in, there’s a lot. Lots of ways to go. A lot. Some people seem to be really drawn to recreating sounds or expanding on sounds from certain eras. And, you know, I have my favorite like production styles and all that stuff, but to talk about things of substance. So it’s not just like 45 minutes of guitar solos, which, like my shadow self, might want, but do shred the guitar. Might I add earlier? Yes, despite my best impulses, I do tend to to fly off the handle every now and again, and like, when I think about the words and what I actually want to say, I think the most the way that makes the most sense to me is to just talk about this place. You know, I’ve only ever lived in a Amiskwacîwâskahikan, Edmonton, and those are my stories. Like everything, every song I’ve written is a song about Edmonton, in a way, like I as I grow older and I find more sweetness and more beauty and in the friends and the kin and the animal kin in this place like it’s all I can do to take in that information and talk about it. It just feels so natural.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
That’s something I immediately related to in your music, because I’ve lived in Mohkinstis Calgary my whole life. I’ve never lived anywhere else, and sometimes with the way Alberta’s maybe political leanings go, you feel like, ‘Is this my home anymore?’ But it is, and that is something that like, sorry, I’m getting a little choked up, just like, really inspired me about your music is saying, like, there is a space for me, because whether you like it or not, this music exists in perpetuity, on Mint Records website, on Bandcamp, as that cassette. This is my mark.
Cassia
Yeah, and in people’s memory, and like oral tradition, like there’s people maybe that bands that never quite made it to to Bandcamp, never made it to YouTube. Maybe there’s some super janky, crunchy videos out there, but it lives on through word of mouth, through in my heart, and what it what it provokes me to write and inspires me to play like that’s just as valid as any kind of digital or analog storage, you know, people’s hearts and minds and the way we can pass those stories on.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
And that’s a very, I think, Indigenous take on the life of art and life of stories. And continuing on that note of Indigeneity, you use the Indigenous name forKinistino Ave as a song title. And I just want to know what feeling does that give you to use like Mohkinstis, the Indigenous name for Edmonton, if you wouldn’t mind repeating it. I’m not sure how to pronounce it.
Cassia
Yeah. Amiskwacîwâskahikan which is Beaver Hills House, if I remember the language correctly, so Kinistino Ave, I mean, I knew it, and sometimes, you know, interchangeably, refer to it as Church Street, which is like it was a colloquial name. It’s known as 96th Street on paper, I think, for the like, constant Latin, huge concentration of churches on that street. Like, I understand how people organically started calling it that. That’s one kind of interesting in its own way. Of course, Kinistino is the first name, so no, all city street names are colonial names, right? It’s yeah. And I think there are varying schools of thought for this entry. Is perspective of like, yeah, we can decolonize the neighborhoods named after the evil white people, people like Frank Oliver, a special shout out to that absolute scumbag. Yeah, and I’m sure there. I’m sure Mohkinstis has its own examples of these, like, reprehensible people and all the things they have named after them. There’s that drive to change the name, and that’s fine, and I respect people fighting that struggle, but really we should be talking about rematriation and just, you know, recognizing the inherent sovereignty rights of the people in all of these territories. And I just wonder, you know, kind of what, how much energy we’re putting in one versus the other, and the work that continues underneath all of this and outside of these structures anyway, of continuing culture, and it’s one thing I like to start conversations by talking about other names. There’s very there’s a lot of power in names. You know, I loved, I love learning about the names, the Indigenous names for the prairies, because oftentimes they actually mean something, yes, rather than somebody from Edmonton, wherever that is in England, like, ‘Oh, I miss my home. I guess I’ll call this place the name.’ It’s like, okay, they’d had a name before. Like, what are you talking about? It was always named. Yeah, it was always named. Was always named something. So I don’t know, just across from one generation to another. Just like, put in a little more effort, yeah? Or just like, learn what other people are saying around you. You know, stop talking past each other. That’s what I want.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a beautiful way of putting it. Thank you for putting you are very well spoken, and I find that very inspiring. CIFF’s interview with you earlier on, the acheulean age was like music to my ears. Oh my goodness, that was such a beautiful conversation. So in relation, just going back to the record, you talk about some some pretty personal hardships, which a lot of singer songwriters do, and I just was wondering, what does it do for you to use music and lyrics to process vulnerable things in your life?
Cassia
Well, I think it just helps me feel less alone. I I mean, I do live for drama, and so it does help to, you know, I can go there and set the pace, you know, but, you know, I put out an album with another band. The album’s called Survival, back in 2020, and that album was very autobiographical, in a way. And the idea had it not come out in April of 2020, the idea is we have conversations, like in the alley smoking a cigarette, like between bands, we have a conversation about, like, this is what this song reminded me of, and it’s like, ‘Oh, that reminds me of this,’ you know, and we can just keep relating to each other. And that’s like, everything I’ve done up to this point has just been to try and engage in a conversation with other people. I’m not saying anything on in relation, you know, the songs that I’ve written about being displaced or the jobs that I’ve lost because of greedy landlords like I don’t think that my situation is the worst expression of what that’s hap of what, how that’s happened, but maybe it’s a point of solidarity. Yeah, and it can start in that emotional place. And hopefully, if enough people get involved, we can start talking analytically, and we can start organizing ourselves. And maybe we can make someone else’s life easier far beyond our scope, just from working together and changing cultural norms about things like private property, about things like wealth extraction, through speculative real estate investment, like all that very dry stuff, it starts with like the messy heart work of understanding that you’re not alone, and understanding that the hardship, like goes beyond just you. And it’s, in fact, the system talking about systems, you know, yeah, that’s the broader conversational shift that I think about when I think about writing emotionally about, you know, the whatever hardships I may have faced, and it’s also why I’m thankful to people like Rylan Kafra And Kyla Pascal, who contributed to in relation as, like prosaic, you know, collaborators. They wrote essays related and analyzing theoretically through scholarship and through lived experience, what I was seeing about emotionally.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
Thank you. That is a very good answer. You were talking about that heart work earlier, and how that’s kind of a jumping off point you know someone else can relate to that. It’s very brave to put your personal experiences as you know, a relation point. Is there ever any? I don’t know if fear is the right word. But are you ever hesitant to be that bear, despite it working for this bigger, beautiful cause? Does it ever you ever sometimes in bed like, dang, I really do have a song about that.
Cassia
Yeah. I mean, it’s just what I know. I’m a bit of a talker. When you get me going, I mean, I think I’m lucky in my life to just feel very held by other queer people and from people who have been listening to me at this point for a long time, which like, blows my mind. Yeah, that vulnerability in my experience is always welcomed with like warmth. It’s really not too often, the only times that I really feel that ache of regret or remorse is when I just knew I could have gone deeper, I guess, as opposed to maybe demurring and, you know, whatever, people are imperfect and I can’t see, I’m always in the mood to share 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You know, who is, yeah. And I think about my friend Joshua, who I wrote about, Joshua Bookhalter, who I wrote about on the album, who passed away a few years ago, like I mean, yeah. My love for Josh has grown throughout the years, and it was such a wonderful thing to learn that in the years since his passing, other songwriters have written about their experiences and their memories of him and, people and community friends of mine have thrown memorial shows where we just watched like the silly little YouTube videos they made together. And most notably, like I was very thankful to see his name in bright lights. He worked on that movie Skinamarink that came out a few years back. Oh my gosh, no way, and he’s thanks in the credits. And when I That movie was terrifying for me. I had difficulty looking at it, yeah, but I also felt so much of him in the shots, like he was, it was a very small team that worked on that movie, and it was like, it just felt him, he lives on, yeah, in that and like, Yeah, we didn’t, I can’t say that, Josh and I always really got to the bone of our emotional selves in the time that we knew each other. We weren’t super tight. It was a very difficult realization after he passed, when I realized that the only photos I had of him, none of it, none of us, none of it was us together. It was all photos of me, which is like such a brutal realization. So I felt just like, oh, I need to write about this. And I need to, you know, when I when I have the zine. I don’t sell this, but I’ve printed some. I’ve printed my favorite photo of Josh from Josh, like his eye, his touch, and I just, I give that to whoever wants one. It’s just like a little postcard, and it’s got his website and his Flickr page in the back. And you can google him if you’re listening to this. His name is Joshua Bookhalter and his Flickr is still up. His website is still up, his Instagram page is still up. You can look at his art, and I really do love his photography and his artistic touch. And a part of this relating for me is, even though he’s gone, his work survives, and I can still spread that word, you know, yeah.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
And it’s almost like your song is your photo of him, yeah, yeah, totally. That’s a cool interdisciplinary cross artistic exchange of what each of you, I guess, are respectively dabbling in arts wise, thank you. That was beautiful. Thank you for sharing that we’re shifting gears quite a bit. I mentioned earlier in your live session on the acheulean age, you shredded on your first song. If you could remind me of the name Vic spring. Vic spring. And I said to CIFF, I was like, What on earth this is fantastic. I’m a huge guitar nerd. Would you mind telling me about your start as a musician like was music always the plan for you?
Cassia
Oh, boy. To the extent that there was a plan, I was I’m thankful that my mom really instilled like I was homeschooled, so for the first few years, and she would take me to the symphony on my days, and she put me in piano lessons despite my protestations and slacker attitude, my dad plays guitar, and he’s played a lot. He plays accordion, got a shout out my dad, because at the ripe age of 60, he decided to teach himself how to play violin or fiddle, as he insists on calling. And he’s Newfoundlander, yeah, plays his maritime music, he plays his little time music, and he just learned from YouTube videos. So good for him. When I say it’s never too late, like, I mean, it is genuine, never too late, yeah? So I, I don’t, I’m not gonna say I grew up in a musical family, like the Rankins or something, but like, I was given an appreciation for the arts, and I was just drawn to loud music, like from an early age, playing piano along to the Magic School Bus theme, like one of little Richard’s finest works, if I might say so
Brooklyn (CJSW)
On record as saying so.
Cassia
I guess, like, yeah, I don’t know I had a guitar and it wasn’t, I wasn’t ready yet, but I picked it up when I was 12. Somehow, that was 20 years ago, and I haven’t picked it up, like skipping school to play all that kind of classic teenage stuff, just like my eyes an inch away from my fingers, yes, like looking at it, running scales, all that stuff.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
What was 12 year old Cassia’s influences?
Cassia
All of the Ozzy Osbourne guitar players,.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
You’re after my heart, oh, my goodness.
Cassia
Like that was, yeah, that was all the pyrotechnics there were. Was a big, a big game changer for me. But like, oh, I don’t know I’m always, I feel like I’m a I have a voracious appetite for guitar playing, especially like the more fried and far out stuff, the older I get. Just, I say probably my like gun to my head. Favorite guitar player right now is Bill Orcutt who has one of the best Tiny Desk concerts like top three. Gotta be top three for me. It’s like to check it out, arranged for four guitars. It’s just like four. It’s like a Telecaster and three jazz mask. Characters all on the bridge pickup all through dimed Fender amps, just like, so bright and clangorous. It sounds like Tom Verlaine at points. It’s just sounds completely melted at others, like, that’s the kind of thing I like and try to reach for myself, specifically for guitar playing. Like, I’m not gonna say I always get there, but just that physicality and that up close and personal feel like, that’s, that’s what excites me.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
That’s the beauty of the guitar, I think, is how fast and various and crazy and clean and simple and complex of a machine that that instrument is.
Cassia
Immediate feedback.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
I read somewhere that you once commented that Wares was a thinly veiled excuse to play music loudly on stage. What do you feel from performing?
Cassia
Oh, I just feel like everything I feel like the best version of myself, to be honest, I feel just wired into the deepest part of my brain. And like I said earlier, just like thinking in microseconds, yeah, and just paying attention to my body. This is when things are going well, I suppose I’ll say. And when I have practiced enough, I can, like you get to this point of rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing so that when you get that massive dose of adrenaline straight to the heart, and you have people watching you, and it’s this trapeze act, in a way, I can just feel like as light as air and, you know, whatever. Maybe I’ll watch the videos afterwards and being like, ‘Oh, that was pretty janky, actually,’ but it’s just a state of mind that I guess I chase of just everything else washing away, yeah, and pushing myself to where I can’t otherwise, get in any other situation. And having that, having it come back to me through the like, the love and the welcoming that I’m I’m so grateful to feel like on the prairies like that, sharing the back and the forth and the getting to watch other people achieve and like, get to that same thing on stage, if they’re, like, about performing, because some people really just are about songcraft and are about recordings. And the way to respect their art is to sit down headphones on just like, get in the zone and listen to the words. Like, I love that. And if people want to engage with on those terms, with my music, I’m very grateful, but I consider myself a performing artist, and I will try and make it easy on you. I will come to your town. I will come to your neighborhood pub. There’s nothing else I’d rather do.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
That’s beautiful. Did you feel that at your Sled Island shows this week. How was the engagement?
Cassia
Sure did, yeah, and that’s, that’s like, such an amazing thing. This is my seventh Sled Island. Somehow, 10 years ago was my first performing Sled Island in 2015 and, yeah, this is just that was a totally different band situation. And at this point in my life and my practice, like to just feel the bloom of people from different years and eras, like picking little faces out in the crowd. Like it, just, yeah, there’s, I’m just gonna do this until my last day on this earth. Like it’s a beautiful feeling, and I’m so thankful.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
That’s beautiful. You will be here. You were here before Sled, you’ll be here after Sled. It does not matter. Cassia Hardy will be there.
Cassia
That’s right.
Brooklyn (CJSW)
Thank you so much for this interview. I had a wonderful time.