Michaela slinger goes hyper-local
Michaela Slinger’s upcoming BC tour isn’t the type of thing you’d necessarily expect from a successful musician working on her third album. Sure, she’s stopping by a couple of classic venues—Duncan Showroom in Cowichan Valley, or Mateada restaurant and music lounge on Salt Spring Island. But she’s also setting up in a vintage store. A grill. Someone’s house.
“I did a big tour last year—19 cities across North America,” Slinger explains on a video call. “It was super intense, it was expensive. I most certainly did not make any money; I spent a lot of money to do it.”
So instead, the Port Moody-born pop songwriter decided to strip it back. To do that, she teamed up with acoustic multi-instrumentalist Lucy Clearwater and dream-pop singer Zoe Sky Jordan; together, the three women are setting off on the Sky Slinger Clearwater tour with simpler intentions.
For starters, their show is a Nashville-style writers’ round, meaning it’s the three of them on stage together, taking turns singing and bantering with each other. And they’re bringing this tour to independent venues across the West Coast: just them and their instruments, travelling in a single car, leaving time to enjoy nature in between the intimate shows. The writers’ rounds framing is deliberate. Slinger has spent a lot of time in Nashville (alongside LA and Toronto, it’s one of her main home bases outside of Vancouver) and loves the format for its ability to highlight lyrics and connection.
“It’s such a direct way to communicate your songs to listeners. And it’s a really personal format,” she says. “It’s not just: come on stage, play a bunch of loud songs, and leave—you get to know a bit more of the people behind the music.”
Slinger is currently working on her third album. It’s a follow-up to last year’s brilliant This Can’t Last Forever (on 604 Records), and her first without a label.
On This Can’t Last Forever, time is a constant spectre. Slinger’s sophomore release (following 2021’s Panorama) is an exploration of expectation and anxiety: she’s racing against the clock with a trickling hourglass riding shotgun. Everything needs to be bigger, faster, sooner—backdropped with urgent percussive heartbeats even as dreamy production sugarcoats moments of despair and desperation.
“This Can’t Last Forever”, the title track, shimmers with pop-rock production that hints at Haim, The Aces, and Carly Rae Jepsen. But underneath the bright synths and glossy layers, even positive moments are tinged with terror. “There’s always been a voice in the back of my head/It’s telling me/This can’t last forever,” Slinger sings.
Similarly, “Little Pieces” deals with the pressure of prodigal success: “I’m 26 now/ So in LA years I’m 50,” she laments. “If I’ve still got time/Why do I already miss me?”
It’s a familiar feeling for many people: that youth is itself a commodity, and getting older is detrimental. If you don’t make it big when you’re young, you’ve lost your shot forever. Slinger says her approach was “frenetic,” coming from the need to prove herself “in the weirdest, hardest” industry.
“I’m turning 28 in May. I think I had a lot of aging anxiety,” she reflects. “But now I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m just getting started.’ All these cool people who I revere are just getting into this sweet pocket of their career in their late thirties—I have so much time. That’s awesome. And I’m not trying to prove anything.”
Similarly, she’s finding herself caring less about being pigeonholed into a specific type of genre. Whether it’s indie pop or earnest folk or wholesome country, there’s nothing inherently good or bad about the labels other people might put on her. She’s just making her music the way she wants to make it.
Her new stuff, she says, is focused on “capturing the spirit of what happens live”: fusing the energy and emotion of being in front of an audience with the technical wizardry of a recording studio.
That balance and tension is reflective of her home city. There’s a push and pull between what Vancouver is and could be— but that uncertainty offers room to dream.
“Vancouver is a funny place, because we’re a big city—but the more you travel, the more you’re like, ‘This is such a small city.’ There’s a lot going on, but it’s sleepy. It’s coastal and hippie, but also not in [regards to] tech and business and real estate,” Slinger adds. “This is a very new, young city, and I like when music reflects that sense of, ‘Where are we going?’”
Maybe a little bit of Nashville is exactly what we need.
The Sky Slinger Clearwater tour plays The Painted Ship on April 11.