Basia Bulat is running on a busy schedule these days. The Montreal-based singer-songwriter’s back from touring her latest album, Basia’s Palace, which she performed across Canada all spring and summer, but her calendar is still full.
While juggling a successful music career is demanding, it’s a different duty that’s been occupying much of Bulat’s time lately: daycare drop-offs and pick-ups. The multi-Juno-nominated autoharpist and Canadian folk-pop darling says she made her fifth album “in all the small hours of the night, when I was going through this period of time that many call matrescence.”
The mother to two young daughters remembers singing some of the album’s first songs while her youngest was just an infant, rocking her to sleep in her arms. “You’re finding yourself and figuring out who you are, while at the same time letting [yourself] escape into a bit of a fantasy world when the reality is changing nappies and waking up every few hours,” she says. “It’s not very magical or mystical, but at the same time, it is actually quite psychedelic.”
This transformational period prompted Bulat to reflect on her own childhood, which informed the songs on the new record. Now, she’s finding renewed inspiration by playing the music she made so quietly “super loud, on all the big stages.”
Originally from Etobicoke, Ont., but based in Montreal for the last decade, Bulat finds joy in watching her backyard garden grow and her daughters explore the teeming life around them one insect and plant at a time.
Here’s what else she had to share about her relationship with the natural world — including her soft spot for a tiny four-legged crooner — when she took our Moose Questionnaire.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. All opinions are the subject’s own.
Illustration: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal
What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed between the Pacific, Atlantic, 49th parallel and Hudson Bay, i.e. Canada?
That’s very hard, because I’ve been to almost every province and territory, with the exception of Nunavut. But the most breathtaking has probably been the view of the Klondike, and just getting to the Yukon. It’s somewhere I was obsessed with getting to since I was really young. When I finally made it, I made an entire record up there, inspired by that trip, called Heart Of My Own. A lot of the melodies came up there. The beauty, the quiet, the energy, the air — everything.
The Yukon holds a special place in Basia Bulat’s heart. It’s where she recorded her 2010 album Heart Of My Own. Photo: Malkolm Boothroyd / The Narwhal
But I also have to say Prince Edward Island. I’m so in love with the south shore of P.E.I, when the tide goes out and the red sand goes on forever and ever. [The Yukon and P.E.I.] are almost tied now. They are completely different, but I feel like they’re equal loves.
What’s the most awe-inspiring natural sight you’ve witnessed outside of Canada?
There’s so many. We live on this beautiful jewel of a planet. I was lucky to get to go to Australia on a tour in 2019, two times, and the second time I gave myself quite a bit of time to explore Queensland and go to the Great Barrier Reef. That was probably one of the most breathtaking experiences of my life.
Think of three iconic Canadian animals. Choose one each to kiss, marry and kill
I don’t want to kill anything! But I’ll kiss a moose, because there’s that great Robert Munsch book about the moose kiss. I’ll marry a beaver, because I think they’d be really good at keeping things together and a great partner. And if I had to kill one, just symbolically, let’s say the black fly, because I’ve suffered a lot from them in my medium-long life.
Name a person or group doing something meaningful for the environment that everyone should know about.
This one I really love. It’s just a very special and not super-known cause. It’s a group of people working to protect the western chorus frog. I’m going to give you the name in French: l’équipe de rétablissement de la renaitte faux-grillon du Québec. It’s a very beautiful, super tiny frog, the western chorus frog. It’s got a beautiful song. They’re vulnerable in Quebec right now and there’s so much pressure on their habitat from development, agriculture — from all sides.
The western chorus frog is found in southwestern Quebec and southern Ontario, and is at risk of extinction in Quebec. The frogs are only a couple centimetres long and have a distinctive call. Photo: Scott Gillingwater
It’s easy for people to forget them because they’re really tiny, so not everybody has seen one. They’re our tiniest cohabitants. This group is working hard to educate people and to preserve the habitat we have for them and get out awareness about the chorus frog. They’ve even partnered with the biodome in Montreal, to help move populations that are endangered to a new section.
I fell in love with the frog myself. I should have said kiss the frog, I guess!
Outdoor cats: yes or no?
Oh yes. I have an outdoor cat and I found him that way — or he found me. I was staying in a cottage in Saguenay and my cat was a kitten at the time. He found me and basically held on with his tiny claws to the screen door until I took him home. I don’t know if someone left him, but I couldn’t change his nature. He was already quite wild.
Tell us about a time you changed your mind about something, environmental or otherwise.
I change my mind all the time, and I have to, to keep being an artist, so I don’t get stuck in my ways. Every record I’ve ever made has been an exercise in changing my mind.
Tell us about a time you tried to change someone else’s mind about something, environmental or otherwise.
I’ve learned the hard way that nobody wins an argument. This is what’s so hard about climate change, because people in many ways feel their identity is threatened, or they feel judgment. It feels like everybody goes from zero to 100 so quickly.
”I change my mind all the time. I have to, to keep being an artist,” says Basia Bulat. Photo: Supplied by Secret City Records
I usually try to live by “show, not tell,” and try to get a sense of where people are coming from. No one likes to be told. Once you start to see each other and meet people where they’re at, some kind of bridge starts to be built. But it’s challenging, so I just try to lead by example and hope that the people around me follow.
Rocky Mountains or Great Lakes?
Some of these questions are very unfair. But I’m going to say Great Lakes, just because I grew up going to the lakes — Georgian Bay, Lake Superior. I’m a Great Lakes girl.
Researchers at Yale University, the France-based Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society and other institutions have found women tend to be more concerned about climate change than men. Why do you think that is?
It’s heartbreaking that it’s gendered like that. I know the impacts of climate change on women in the Global South are stronger. Maybe I’m being too generalist when I say this — or maybe it’s my perspective as a mother now — but we call her Mother Earth. This is the mother that brought us all life. It could be that connection. I can’t really give an explanation, but it breaks my heart.
If you could dip a toe off Canada’s coastline, which ocean would it be in?
I love the Pacific and I love the Atlantic, but I haven’t been up far enough to dip my toe in the Arctic, so I would dip my toe there — if it would come out still, not in a block of ice.
What’s a beautiful or useful thing you’ve owned for a really long time?
I’m going to say my Martin guitar. Because I’ve written so many songs on it. I think a lot of people would think it’s beautiful, and it just gives me a beautiful feeling.
What’s the farthest north you’ve ever been and what did you do there?
I think the farthest north is Dawson City, or just north of Dawson City. Some friends drove me a little bit farther north, and that’s where I took the album photographs for Heart Of My Own. It was a life-changing trip.
What’s one way you interact with the natural world on a daily basis?
In my garden. I have a little garden, and I try to do something in there every day. Right now, it’s trampled a lot by tiny feet, but we’ve got grapes going, and I have a plum tree. Mostly the garden is feeding the animals, because I can’t get around to harvesting it myself. But the birds and the squirrels are very happy. I’m getting different birds right now, with the grapes I have. I have to figure out what they are — they’re much bigger, and speckled. I haven’t seen them before, in five years of living at this place.
In addition to spending time with her daughters outdoors, Bulat says she grew up influenced by both her mother and grandmother’s green thumbs and affinity for nature. Now, the two women help her in her own garden — “I actually made a record about it,” the musician says of her 2022 album The Garden. Photo: Supplied by Secret City Records
Usually every morning I’m out there, sitting on the back porch with my kiddos and looking for birds. It’s really nice to have even a tiny place. It’s a little bit of heaven.
Who in your life has had the greatest impact on your connection to nature?
Probably my mother and my grandmother. They’re both amazing gardeners. My mom, growing up, really tried to get us up into nature all the time. Camping, going up to an uncle’s cottage whenever she could sneak us in, and just making us go out into the forest. I have so many memories of just wandering around until she would blow this whistle and the dog we had would round up all us kids to come home for supper.
And my grandmother, I don’t know how she did it, but she had the greenest thumb, so she could just take a branch off of anything and grow it into a tree. There’s a few trees in my mom’s yard now that are maybe 30 feet tall, that started from a stem my grandmother charmed. So I’m hoping some of that passed down to me.
Whose relationship with the natural world would you most like to have an impact on?
My daughters. I’m trying to do that now, all the time. We just spent the summer on Prince Edward Island, and right now we’re really into bugs — understanding that they’re not all scary and that we can learn about them. My daughter is very into snails right now, and hermit crabs and starfish. I’m getting amazing questions from my four-year-old about, like, groundwater, and where the water comes from. And why we don’t just throw things away, and why we have to do all these things like recycling and composting. With all the questions, it’s like, oh yeah, here’s my chance to let it set in early.
Prince Edward Island and its red-sand beaches are a favourite destination for Basia Bulat and her family. Photo: Giordano Campini / The Canadian Press
Yes, you have to choose: smoked salmon or maple syrup?
That’s easy. Maple syrup — on everything.
Would you rather be invited to Victoria and David Beckham’s Muskoka cottage, or Harry and Meghan Sussex’s B.C. escape?
I want to visit Raffi on Salt Spring Island. He’s always posting his beautiful views and I would love to go visit him in B.C.
Camping: yes or no?
Oh yeah, absolutely. I’m not a great portage-multiday-trekking person, or someone who’s super skilled in terms of survival skills, but I love camping, and hopefully I’ve still got time to work my way up to that level.
Enjoying the Moose Questionnaire? Read more from the series here.
