The rise of weird, wonderful Safia Nolin
MONTREAL— The haunting, meditative first song that Safia Nolin ever wrote came at one of the lowest periods in her difficult young life.
It was 2012, and the Quebec City native had experienced brutal and unceasing bouts of bullying. She had cycled through schools in a futile search for a fresh start. Her parents had divorced. She was short of money and was often struck by crippling anxiety.
On that fateful day, her clothes were shabby, her shoes had holes and her Internet provider was the local library. Feeling particularly discouraged, Nolin poured her frustration into song. What emerged were the French lyrics for what would be known as “Igloo.”
“The clouds crash down on my head/The sea swallows my feet/The wind is like a dirty traitor/Amusing itself in making me bend,” the song begins.
“I wander like a ghost with amnesia/In the damned streets of Limoilou/Under the watch of a plastic owl/In the lower town is my igloo.”
In a recording of the song that was posted to Nolin’s YouTube channel in February 2012, she is on a bathroom floor, with a towel and shampoo bottle over her left shoulder. The toilet is visible when she sways side to side with the tune.
But the magic of her voice and lyrics make you forget the setting.
A few months later, they would also win Nolin the SOCAN Award for Best Song at a competition festival in Granby, Que., that is renowned for discovering the musical talents of tomorrow. In the four years that followed, she produced a professional demo, signed a record deal and put out an album that has made Nolin one of the most celebrated young musicians in Quebec, and in Canada.
Her album, Limoilou (named for the Quebec City neighbourhood where she grew up) won her the coveted Felix trophy for Revelation of the Year at Quebec’s music industry gala, putting her in the company of previous winners, such as Lisa LeBlanc, Coeur de Pirate, Ariane Moffatt, Mitsou and, yes, even Céline Dion.
The album was longlisted for the 2016 Polaris Prize earlier this year; she has toured through France and she is also nominated at December’s Canadian Folk Music Awards in the category of French Songwriter of the Year.
“It’s f---ing weird. It’s so sudden and fast and intense that it’s just weird, in a good sense,” said Nolin, 24, in an interview that was peppered with two of her most commonly invoked words: “weird” and “f---.”
“In writing and releasing (the album), so many things changed that my life doesn’t at all resemble what it was before. Everything changed. I have a goal. I have a profession. I can live my life. I know where I’m going.”
As fame has found her, Nolin left behind Quebec City to make her home in Montreal. She has legally changed her name, dropping her father’s Algerian surname a few months before her album was released for that of her Québécoise mother. And she has slowly gotten used to being recognized by strangers who know her from concerts, the press or in television appearances.
But not everything has changed, as she rudely discovered two weeks ago at the Quebec music gala, which is known by its French acronym, ADISQ.
When she took to the stage to collect her trophy, she was dressed in a grey cardigan, jeans, scuffed running shoes and a T-shirt paying homage to Gerry Boulet, a deceased Québécois rock icon. Her acceptance speech was peppered with her favourite words.
The critics — particularly three female Journal de Montréal columnists — sharpened their pens over language and dress that they deemed as showing a lack of respect for the audience and the award. That seemed to open the doors on social media for a more crude, mean dressing down of the young singer.
“I got messages saying that I was a bad example for women, an idiot, the queen of stupidity, an embarrassment for women and for Quebec in general. Messages that talked about my hygiene, my weight and my hair,” she wrote in a column a few days later on the website Urbania.
As time has passed and emotions have cooled, Nolin admits that the attacks brought back memories of her bullied youth. But she discovered an inner strength that allowed her to defend herself and say, unapologetically, that what people see is what they get.
The attention may be the negative side of fame, but it’s not something Nolin is willing to accept.
“There are people who think (the gala appearance) was planned, that it was a marketing ploy, but that’s so stupid. If you look at my interviews, videos or shows and then you meet me in life there is no difference,” she said.
“I speak poorly and this is how I dress.. . . . To wear a dress to an event, to wear makeup and everything else, is so not me. I would have been a clown in my own head.”
Being true to herself and her experience has been a successful recipe thus far. Sales of Limoilou on iTunes Canada this week put her in the top 10, right behind the likes of Bon Jovi, Leonard Cohen and Keith Urban.
It’s something she says she has trouble believing. But she is slowly getting used to the realities of this new life.
Later this month, Nolin will load her luggage into a truck with a bunch of friends and head for Banff, Alberta. The friends will continue on a two-week road trip while Nolin settles in at a writer’s retreat where she is meant to start work on her second album.
It is just one indication of how far Nolin, the fed-up, frustrated aspiring singer, has come from the days when she was belting it out from her bathroom floor. En scène is a monthly column on Quebec culture. Email: awoods@thestar.ca