Born out of tragedy, Calgary-American band Jolie Laide release sophomore record
It was nearly 20 years ago when Nina Nastasia and Clinton St. John showcased their vocal chemistry around campfires in the U.S.
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This was long before the Calgary-American band, Jolie Laide, officially formed, but it was a pivotal moment in determining their future sound.
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At the time, St. John was performing as part of Calgary trio The Cape May alongside Jeff MacLeod and Matt Flegel. The act had recorded their 2006 sophomore album, Glass Mountain Roads, in Chicago with producer Steve Albini, best known for producing records by Nirvana and the Pixies. One of the reasons the band was so determined to have Albini at the helm was the work he had done with Nastasia, an American singer-songwriter with a devoted cult following that included Laura Marling, the late BBC DJ and journalist John Peel and Albini. Members of The Cape May had become particularly obsessed with her 2002 sophomore record, The Blackened Air.
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As luck would have it, she was scheduled to enter the studio to work on another record with Albini after The Cape May's sessions were over. So the producer asked them to stick around. A friendship blossomed, which led to the trio becoming both Nastasia's opening act and her backup band for a lengthy North American and European tour. On part of the American leg, they stayed at campsites rather than hotels and spent many evenings singing around the fire where the voices of St. John and Natasia would seamlessly blend.
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'I have a video, actually, because I took a lot of video on that American tour,' says MacLeod. 'Nina and Clinton would sing songs around the campfire for the nights we camped and I just remember clocking how good their voices linked up together.'
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It is a deceptively wholesome anecdote, because the full origin story of how Jolie Laide became a band is actually a dark, stranger-than-fiction tale about tragedy, trauma and renewal. It involves a devastating suicide, a creative rebirth for Nastasia after a decade-long exile from music and the enduring friendship between Canadian and American musicians. Earlier this week, the band – whose name is a French phrase that translates to 'pretty ugly' – released its sophomore album, Creatures, which focuses on that early vocal interplay between St. John and Nastasia. Every song on Creatures is a duet between the two singers.
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But originally, Jolie Laide was born out of tragedy. In 2020, just months before the world would shut down due to COVID-19, Nastasia's partner and longtime musical collaborator Kennan Gudjonsson took his life. It happened one day after Nastasia left him after a 25-year relationship, which had been so marked by conflict and abuse t hat it had kept her away from music for nearly a decade.
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'It was one of those things where I couldn't continue music anymore the way we were doing it,' she says. 'I couldn't do it without Kennan, because that would have been a huge betrayal, and I couldn't do it with him anymore because it was just so absolutely unfun. So I quit for a long time.'
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Kennan's death was obviously hard on Nastasia but also for MacLeod, whose friendship with the couple had deepened over the years. Gudjonsson had become one of his best friends, and the two were working on a screenplay idea that MacLeod had spontaneously pitched to comedian Norm Macdonald after meeting him at the Laugh Shop in Calgary. MacLeod wanted Gudjonsson, whom he describes as Chris Farley meets Christopher Hitchens, to co-write it. So he would make frequent trips to the couple's apartment in New York City.
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'I was so in their lives at that point,' MacLeod says. 'Me and Nina were always friends but at that point super close because I was going to New York to stay with them a bunch. One day we were just talking on the phone about Kennan and everything and she said, 'I haven't played music in so long, I would love to just do anything. Send me anything. Do you have any riffs?' Because it was COVID, this would have been March, I had been playing guitar a lot and experimenting with this desert-y spaghetti western kind of thing that I had never done before. I just started firing them off to Nina and, without an hour going by, she sent them back and they were more or less the songs you heard on our first record.'
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