Hard work pays off for Charlotte Day Wilson
Toronto singer trying to take it slow as hype accumulates
Alittle less than a year ago, Charlotte Day Wilson was the opening act for fellow Toronto R&B singer Daniel Caesar during his sold-out show at the Mod Club, something of a combined unveiling for her and victory lap for Caesar.
Already a much buzzed-about act in her own right, Wilson won new admirers that night with her subdued soul, rich vocal texture and instrumental acuity, wielding a saxophone at one point and sending a charge through the crowd with her soon-to-be calling card “Work.” Perhaps the only fleeting hint of her newcomer nerves came when she admitted frustration with some malfunctioning gear.
“Everything that could’ve gone wrong has gone wrong already,” she joked then.
Well, not 12 months later, it seems everything that could’ve gone right for Wilson in the interim has — and now she’s the one set to headline an eagerly anticipated Mod Club showcase.
In fact, demand for Wilson’s Canadian Music Week-affiliated appearance was sufficiently searing that she’s now playing two gigs, April 19 and 20, both of which have sold out. With toasts from taste-making press including Fader, Pitchfork and Nylon, which called her the “next best thing out of Toronto,” Wilson was nevertheless caught merrily off guard by her suddenly swollen local following.
“I literally had no idea,” marvelled the singer, pretty much as low-key as her austere music. “When I opened for Daniel Caesar, it was a great show and a great night, but it’s crazy to think what’s happened in the year to change that situation. “It’s wild.” Wilson is chatting in High Park on a February afternoon so surprisingly balmy that joggers trot by in tank tops and a pair of keeners trade volleys on a tennis court bisected by piles of snow. Wilson, clad all in black except for white sneakers and a grey toque embroidered with her initials, grew up so close by that this was more or less her bountiful backyard.
As a kid, however, Wilson pretty much divided her free time between the ice and the ivories. Hockey and piano were her dual disciplines, and she was determined to succeed at both. She played hockey until the end of high school, when she worried that she was so focused on the sport it was preventing her from “developing other parts of (her) personality.” She was driven enough that, as a sixth-grader, she once emailed four-time Olympic gold medallist Hayley Wickenheiser for advice on dealing with nerves.
“She emailed me back: ‘Take those butterflies and let them fly in formation,’ ” Wilson remembered with a laugh. “Damn, that was amazing.”
She was equally devoted to piano. Classically trained, she studied at the Royal Conservatory until Grade 9 and continued refining her skill. She still finds joy in guiding her fingers through a classical piece: “It’s like a brain massage.”
By the time she was attending Dalhousie University for music, she would add guitar, bass and saxophone to her musical CV. More revelatory was Wilson’s high school discovery that she could sing. She, who now fetches frequent comparisons to Sade, had little confidence in her voice until her dad bought her a microphone and a MIDI keyboard around Grade 11 and she started recording music on GarageBand. At the time, Wilson was very partial to indie folk (Fleet Foxes and Feist) and she soon got into R&B (Erykah Badu and D’Angelo, especially) while continuing to love the Motown records her parents reared her on.
Perhaps that’s why she’s frequently painted as a throwback now — Pitchfork called her “a warden of the old school” — but she sees things a little differently.
“I’m not as experimental as a lot of people are these days. But I wouldn’t call it old school because it’s new,” Wilson said, noting that she prefers the term “timeless.”
“My version of timeless is something I’ll always want to go back to.”
So far, “Work” is her biggest hit. A wispy R&B tune haloed by echoes of gospel, it’s been featured in an iPhone commercial and Netflix’s Grace and Frankie. It’s her favourite Charlotte Day Wilson song, too.
“I think that’s why everyone else likes it the most,” she said.
In the year since releasing her sixtrack debut EP, she’s worked diligently to come up with something new. One of her New Year’s resolutions was, in fact, to stop writing so much new music. She worried that the discipline that seems to be necessary would drain the process of its magic.
Work might be in her nature, but this past year has been dizzying and there’s something to be said for taking it slow.
“It’s been super-intense. It’s been a lot,” she said. “When people recognize me, every time I’m with my girlfriend, I’m like: ‘That was so weird. What the hell?’
“A lot of parts of my life have changed in the last year. I feel very lucky that things seem to be working out.”