A rising star on the Canadian music scene, Toronto-based Christee Palace is rapidly gaining a reputation for her excellence as a performer and songwriter, as she is able to craft songs that are at once insistently listenable, but infused with depth of emotion and a self-revelatory honesty that build a connection with all who hear her music.
Her new single, Danger, is emblematic of her skill and compelling ability to touch hearts, minds and spirits.
Making the most out of the Covid-19 lockdown, Palace is trying her best to be productive and take advantage of the downtime to be creative, although still missing the chance to perform, and more significantly, to derive income from those gigs.
“There have definitely been some low points, but I also have enjoyed it at sometimes. I feel that for a lot of up-and-coming young artists there is just so much pressure to be relevant and to continually be putting themselves out there and putting material out there. I feel like that happened with me, to a certain extent. The lost gigs, that part of it has been awful, I haven’t been on a stage now for more than three months, and that part of it sucks,” she said from her home in Toronto, where she lives with her boyfriend, Jaden D., who is a videographer and budding film director, and who shot and edited the video for Danger during the early weeks of the pandemic.
“I feel that maybe it’s a good time for all of us artists who are constantly ‘on’ to take a little break, take a step back and reconnect with yourself. And that’s where I am at right now. That being said, I am excited for things to go back to normal. I feel like I have had enough of a break now, but that this probably needed to happen for a lot of people. It’s a big eye opener in the sense that whatever you think is normal can be taken from you in two seconds. I feel, again, there has been some good and bad, it’s really up to each person how you choose to spend your time and energy.
“I have had an opportunity to spend a lot of time with myself writing and reconnecting with who I am as an artist, which is great. I have always had a pretty strong social media presence and that obviously is the biggest way to connect with people now, so that hasn’t changed much for me. I am thinking about doing more live streams, but it definitely is not the same as playing live.”
Danger is the first of a proposed collection of songs that will probably be released as an EP later in the year, although once again the spectre of the pandemic and its effect on the music business may change Palace’s thinking on how to release music moving forward.
“This is the first of a few releases to come that are all part of a bigger EP. Obviously with all the stuff that’s been happening with the pandemic, I have had to rethink the way I am going about releasing things. That being said, Danger needed to come out now: it was my first release in a really long time, since the Harden My Heart EP. I wanted to get it out there, especially the video, and I am lucky in the sense that my boyfriend Jaden is a videographer and he is also my photographer as well, so we were able to create something and put it out there, even though it wasn’t quite what I wanted initially, but I think it turned out pretty well,” she said.
“Moving forward, I am definitely planning new things and adjusting what I was eventually going to do with the other songs and the EP for sure. The other songs are done and in the can, although I am constantly doing new stuff anyways. I have a lot of new songs that are already fully written, and I am hopefully going to be recording them soon. For the EP it will be a matter of figuring out the best way to release them during a pandemic.”
Palace’s collaborator is Tal Vaisman of The Ascot Royals. He was one of Palace’s first champions when she moved to Toronto from Windsor a few years ago and has been both her songwriting partner and producer ever since.
“He produced all the tracks for me, and he is frickin awesome. He is such a talented dude. He was also part of the first EP with me, so he has been a big part of my journey since I moved to Toronto. He knows me really well and he understands who I want to be as an artist and is helping me develop and grow into my new sound too,” she said.
“It’s interesting, because when I moved from Windsor, I actually changed my name. My original name was Christie Palazzolo, and I feel like I left a little piece of my identity behind. That being said, I have grown into the artist that I believe I was always meant to be. I was always a pop artist and I think my songs have developed int more of a modern pop sound with a little bit of a rock edge that I love. Every time you’re writing, or go back into the studio, it’s important to be constantly developing yourself and pushing yourself a little more. It’s been a very interesting process. And it’s not that I have completely changed, I just think it’s a little more modern and a little more mature.”
Palace, nee Palazollo, came from a musical family that was well known on the Windsor scene. Her dad, Pete Palazollo played in numerous bands in the area and has owned the Canadian Conservatory of Music in Windsor for more than 30 years.
“My father is extremely musical. He is a producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, so I have been around music my whole life. He had me singing and playing piano since I was three. It’s just normal for me to grow up around all that. My aunts and uncles on my dad’s side all play too. To be someone from that family who is now going off to try and pursue something even greater in music is an honour for me, because I hope to do them proud and take everything that I have learned from growing up around them and take it to the next level,” Palace said.
“I think a big part of me always knew that I wanted to do something more with music, but as you grow up in our society, it’s hard to imagine a musician being successful and making a living and unfortunately that’s just the reality, right? You’re one person in a sea of millions of other artists and musicians who are all trying to do the same thing. It’s a little scary, but I believe when it’s something you love to do, for some reason you just always end up coming back to it.
“For me, I think I just reached a point where I said to myself that it was now or never. If I am going to really try to do this I need to go, I need to do it in a bigger city at a bigger level. I’ve got to give it my all and see what happens. I know that no matter what, I will end up doing something related to music. I know that, even though there was some doubt when I made the call four years ago. It’s never an easy decision to make.”
When Palace found out that her interlocutor was from the town of Greater Napanee in Eastern Ontario, she enthused at length about the town’s biggest national and international export, the punk-pop princess, Avril Lavigne, who was born and raised in the community.
“Avril Lavigne is my number one. Oh my God I am going to cry. Anyone that talks to me about my influences, they know that Avril Lavigne is number one, and she always has been. She was the reason I started to write my own songs. I have talked to people about this but when she first came out I think I was in Grade 4 or something and I remember I used to get bullied a lot in grade school because I was kind of a tomboy and I remember at the time the only super popular artists were Britney Spears and the Spice Girls. Not that I didn’t like them, because I did – I liked all pop music. But I was craving an artist that represented me and when I started writing I wrote about edgier, bolder things, even when I was in grade school. When Avril came out it was like, oh my God, this is what I have been waiting for, this is what I have wanted. She just represents who I felt I was even as a young kid. And I started songwriting even more seriously after that, because I wanted to make other people feel the same way she made me feel, and the rest is history.”
Songwriting is as much inspiration as it is skill and technique for Palace, with song ideas coming to her hither and yon through a variety of experiences.
“It’s never the same way. I find it interesting because, for me, there is not a set structure. There is not a set in stone way of doing things. I know that it can come from me just humming a random melody to myself walking down the street. Something can come into my head and I transfer that to piano as quick as I can and come up with a chord progression and then the words come after,” she explained.
“But it can also be that the words come first. Even if I am sort of writing poetry for example, I am just sitting there writing and something clicks then I just transfer that over to piano or guitar depending on what the song is. And it comes both ways. The ‘Notes’ app on my phone is chock full of ideas: it’s endless. I am constantly adding to it every day. I feel as a songwriter that you’re always in that mindset of how I feel, what’s going on in the world around me, what can I use for a new song. You’re always looking for inspiration, so it’s always different for me.”
Danger looks at the complexities of a relationship being torn asunder using metaphors and descriptors related to cars to explore the topic.
“This is the cliché artist answer I guess, but it’s obviously from a personal experience of mine. I think for me it’s sort of going back into my headspace of what I was feeling at the time I was going through that specific relationship and what it meant to me. I think this song is applicable to many people in sense that it’s a relationship you headed into too quickly, and you kind of have bad feelings about it. Yet you continue on with it anyways and then you end up exactly where you knew you were going to end up. That’s what the song is to me,” Palace explained.
“Using the cars made sense because a lot of our relationship was us driving to gigs and, on the highways, so actually it perfectly represents the relationship in every way for me.”
Originally, pre-Covid, Palace had bigger and bolder ideas for the music video for Danger. In the end, with her boyfriend, a sparse country road, a car and video camera, they ended up making something far grittier, more realistic, and in lockstep with the emotional tone and tenor of the song itself.
“First of all, I wanted to hire other actors. The initial idea was to have me being myself singing the song and sort of acting as the narrator in the video. I wanted to showcase a guy with this new girl that he ended up with. What would have ended up happening was, in the music video, instead of me jumping out of the car, I wanted for the couple to be in the car together and sort of run into me. It was going to be similar in the sense that a car was very prominent,” she said.
“But to be honest, I am happy with how it turned out. Now that it is what it is, I can’t really imagine it any other way. I think it’s perfect because it just takes everybody on an emotional journey of what I went through. It is deeply personal, so in hindsight I makes more sense for the video to be just about me. In terms of the location, I knew that I wanted it to be on a country road, preferably with no traffic, just so we could have the intimacy of myself reconnecting with what happened. We just drove around found a spot that was perfect right near Toronto. All in all, it took two days to film with all the outside shots did on one day and then we shot the parking garage scenes the other day.”
For more information, visit https://www.christeepalace.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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