By Jim Barber
The power of art is as limitless as it is varied and mysterious. Why do certain paintings, sculptures, pieces of music, dance steps, films or stage plays stir feelings that can run the emotional gamut? Why does the human soul crave the sort of spiritual and psychological uplift, encouragement or consolation generated by art? Why do we turn to the work of creators to help us plow through the churning waters of life, to help us get on with our work of living?
The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind … okay it’s a little more complicated than that, but the truth of the matter is we have theories, but we really don’t know why when someone writes a melody, adds chords, and then lyrics these constructs can wash away the grime of sadness, loneliness or grief. They can raise our spirits to joyful heights of celebration, or simply just make us nod in agreement as if to say, “I’ve been there. I know what that feels like. Thank you for articulating through your music what I, as a listener, can’t.”
Quebec-based singer/songwriter Genevieve Racette has taken the emotional and psychological crucibles of her own life, and done exactly what’s been outlined above – used her gifts to make art that proves we all have beating hearts, minds that roil with inner conflict, but ultimately that we share a sense of resilience, of surviving, and thriving.
At the end of January, Racette released a revitalized, ‘Deluxe’ version of her potently powerful 2024 album, Golden, her fourth in the last decade, solidifying her as one of Canada’s most compelling, authentically truthful artists on the scene.
The idea to revisit Golden actually began with a song written near the end of the creative cycle for the release, but held back from being recorded at the time. ‘Common Denominator’ not only triggered a deeper level of introspection on Racette’s part, as she searched for even deeper emotional touchstones and more raw interpretations of the songs on Golden, but it has also become a sensation amongst her fans, leading to the idea of a more comprehensive reexamination of the album.
“I wrote ‘Common Denominator’ at the end of the production for Golden. We were almost done, the mix and masters were on the way, and then I wrote this new song. I remember thinking ‘oh my gosh, it fits on there. It’s part of the same story, it has to be on Golden.’ But I was out of time. I decided to put it in my back pocket and maybe I’ll release it on the one-year anniversary of the album as a special bonus track. Then, in the fall of 2024, we went on tour for seven weeks in the States, so we played a lot of shows. We were playing this new version of [Nirvana’s] ‘Come As You Are,’ that I came up with and I noticed that the fans were really digging it. They really liked it and I was getting all these comments about it. I thought that maybe we could record it and also release it. So, one thing led to another and I decided, well I might as well do a couple of other extra things, so now I had four tracks I wanted to release and it just made sense to put them on what we’re calling Golden (Deluxe),” she said over Zoom from her mom’s house in Dorval, a suburb of Montreal.
“And with the ability to do digital releases, we have more freedom nowadays to go back and take another look at something that maybe we wanted to do differently but ran out of time. I’ve always thought that the hardest part about making an album was, to me, finishing it. Saying ‘okay, we’re done. We’re not changing anything. It’s done.’ That’s the hardest part. But now we’re able to go back and stretch it out a little more. You can play a little bit with the songs if you want to do that. And re-releasing it with these new tracks gives the album itself a second wind as well. Nowadays, there’s so much music coming out, and things are so different in the industry, it’s easy for your music to get lost. Let’s say you release an album, and then Taylor Swift suddenly drops a new album randomly that same week. Your fans are still going to listen to your album, but you might have a hard time finding other people to find it, let alone listen to it. So it’s nice to have a second opportunity to push it one more time. I know already that I am getting a lot more streams and followers because I’m doing PR for the Deluxe version. It keeps the ball rolling while I’m working on the next record.
“And the song itself, ‘Common Denominator,’ is basically about someone who keeps saying that all their exes are crazy, which was the concept behind the video. So a guy on TikTok commented on my video and had a line about each one of his exes saying, she did this, and this other one did that, and she did this other thing to me. So I responded to his comment with a video post and I said, ‘bro, the song is about you! You’re the common denominator.’”
Each album Racette creates is a snapshot in time, which is a cliché, but it is one that is apt because the listener gets to peel back the layers of her soul, heart, mind and spirit as they are laid bare – giving those really paying attention a visceral, almost telekinetic tour of what she had been going through in the lead-up and mechanics of making her musical art.
Golden takes the idea of being boldly revelatory, of exposing the deepest and darkest thoughts, the most profound experiences and the most authentic of responses to these experiences and doubles down in the intensity of storytelling, the power of Racette’s journey through a troubling, yet ultimately empowering time.
“I’ve never done a true concept album. For me, when I sing the songs, it brings me back to certain moments, certain people. For each record, it’s the same emotion underlying all of the songs. Golden was definitely about big time healing. It was really like a sanctuary for me, this album. I escaped the world while I was working on this album. I was trying to create a world because I didn’t want to be in the one I was actually living in. And before that, Satellite [2022] was definitely a heartbreak record. But it was a different type of heartbreak. It was a well-needed heartbreak. I was evolving, I was going into my 30s. I was discovering new things, but all of this was happening through the pandemic as well. So each album really has its own underlying emotion. I’m not sure what this next one’s going to be. I never really know when I first start. I just write about what I need to write, and then at the end, I connect the dots, and when I do, it always magically makes sense,” she said.
“The big thing I was going through, that led to Golden and I think it’s still a bit taboo in the world, but I don’t mind talking about it and I don’t mind if you write about, but I was in an abusive relationship. And that shit will wear you down in every aspect of your life. When I look back now, even a year after I released the album, even more so, I see how that relationship had affected every aspect of my life, and how it affected my career. It affected my self-image. It affected my relationships with my friends, with my family. It just took over my whole life. And then when it was over and I was healing from that, I really needed my community to be there for me, and I never realized how important having friends and family around could be in a moment like that. One of the last songs I wrote for the album was ‘The Reasons I’ll Be Alright,’ which is also the last track on the original album. It’s a love song to my community for helping me go through all of the shit I sing about on the album and the break-up, obviously, and a bunch of other things that you don’t even want to know about. Look, it was terrible and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. I wouldn’t ever want to go through it again.
“But at the same time, I’ve learned so much about myself, about relationships, about the dynamic between men and women and abusive relationships. I’ve also learned so much about the police system and the justice system. I’m a new person. It sucked big time, but I’ve grown a lot through it all. That’s basically what I was trying to heal from and escape from while I was working on the record. But I really didn’t mean for it to be, like, therapy. But that’s how people are interpreting it. I’m a big-time therapy lover. It’s changed my life. Again, it was not my intention, but it does make sense. Ultimately, I just needed to write what I needed to write, and that’s how it came out.”
It’s baldly apparent that music is a powerful tonic for Racette. It is the method by which she processes the good, the bad and the ugly in life, and by releasing and performing the music she writes from these experiences, she transfers that healing power to all within the sound of her voice. Art in general, and music in particular brings people together, allows for the venting of bad thoughts and feelings, and the celebration of the things that are life affirming. Racette understands this dynamic from both sides of the equation – as an audience member and fan, and as a creator.
“On a personal level, music has saved me so many times. There are literally songs that I can’t listen to now because when I was deeply, deeply depressed, before I healed, I was listening to those songs on a loop and it was the only comforting thing for me. Now, if I try to listen to them, my body actually reacts – my heart beats fast. It takes me back to that time. That’s how powerful music can be. Music is so important, or any type of art that you like, whether it’s movies or visual arts, whatever, it is a way to escape the world that we’re in and just dive into something else for a few minutes or a few hours. It’s so important to have a place to get away,” she said.
“Most times, I don’t want to watch the news. I don’t want to see what’s going on. I would much rather just listen to an album that I like and escape to that world for a minute. It’s like the soundtrack of our lives, at least music is that for me. It’s like there’s always been a soundtrack for every period of my life, when I was really into this artist, and later I was really into this other artist. It’s like a timeline. One of those is Donovan Woods. It’s not so much that his songs are pick me up kind of songs, it’s just that I appreciate him so much as an artist. I think he’s my favourite songwriter in the world. He’s so good, and I know all of his songs. So there’s him and Casey Musgraves, Ruston Kelly, John Mayer, Norah Jones, Kelsey Ballerini – there are so many artists, but those are my main ones that I always come back to over the last five or six years.
“But I also really love pop punk. And of course Avril Lavigne. I listen to Simple Plan almost every day, so I’m a bit of a mix in terms of my choices of different music. But I definitely listen to pop punk for different reasons than when I want to listen to Donovan Woods. Pop punk is all about energy and get up and go music. Donovan Woods and some of the other songwriters I named, that’s for when I am sitting down with my headphones on and just want to immerse myself and kind of drift away.”
Having such a diversity of personal musical tastes, and also being an artist herself, means that Racette’s approach to her own craft continues to evolve as she incorporates more musical influences and more life experiences.
“When I first started, I was definitely more of a music person than a lyric person. Now, after more than a decade, I’ve definitely transformed into a lyric person first. So for the last few years, I’ve noticed that it works in a certain way. Something will happen in my life that will get me thinking. I can give you an example. I was in New Orleans recently for the Folk Alliance International Conference and there was a lot of violence in the United States going on at the time. ICE had murdered two people, so the air was heavy. One night we saw that there was a parade – a Star Wars-themed parade. I’m a bit of a nerd, so I was excited. We go to the Star Wars parade because the whole day was kind of gloomy feeling because of everything going on. At the parade there’s all these children there, and everyone’s jumping up and down and everyone’s so happy and being silly and having such a good time, and it made me feel so good. I realized how important it is to just be around people and just be silly sometimes,” she explained.
“That experience has been stuck in my brain ever since, so I am going to try and keep that thought there and keep thinking about it and as part of that, I am going to write different sentences, different observations and thoughts about how it made me feel, and then eventually I’m going to sit down and try to write a song about it and see how that works. Whether it’s a happy thing or a sad thing, I need to process it a little more before I decide. And maybe I will write a song about it and it’ll suck, or I’ll have nothing to say. That happens. But I always save a couple of ideas and files in my brain from experiences like that, and then when I sit down to write I pull out those thoughts.”
The song that ended up being the title track for Golden was one of the last ones written for the project, and it’s theme of taking something positive from something awful became one of the overarching emotional take-aways for the listener and for Racette herself from the entire process.
“I remember having all these songs, but thinking that I didn’t have a title track. And in my head, I’m not done until I have the title track. So I brainstormed with my friend Danielle Knibbe whom I’ve been writing with for a while, and I told her I wanted a title track. I wanted to find the common denominator within all the songs, and I want to write a song based on that to be the title track. Through talking with her, that’s when we came up with the idea of turning sorrow into something golden. What I tried to do as best as I could with the song was to take all my pain and transform it into art. So that’s how the song came about,” she said.
“The person the song is speaking to is me. She’s definitely me, and she’s longing for peace, and to keep turning sorrow into something golden. It’s saying, ‘whatever happened, it’s what you do with it that is important. If you stay in it and you stay depressed or stay sad or angry, that’s your choice.’ I decided to not do that. I did stay in it and was depressed for a bit, but I really got out with songs. That’s what saved me. And that’s really what the song is about. But it’s not easy. There’s definitely clinical depression and things you can’t just choose not to experience. You can’t really choose not to have it, but you can do everyday little things, little choices, that will make you feel good. Only you can do that.”
‘My Thoughts of You,’ is a piercingly beautiful song about love and longing, written and performed as almost a private, intimate missive between lovers. The Deluxe version is more stripped back, but in a way, even more blissfully intimate.
“I wrote it during the pandemic. I was alone a lot. I lived alone and I was alone for a long time, and I just had never written a bit of a sexy song. I had never done that, so I thought I would try it out. And I think if you listen to it without really taking in the words too much, it doesn’t sound too sexy. But then if you really dig in you’re like, ‘whoa, okay.’ And that’s what I was trying to do. It is intimate but I didn’t want to make it too much. I wanted to express the desire but also the playfulness. I wanted it to be a little sensual, a little intimate, but I didn’t know how to approach that at first. But I think we did a good job with that one. It was one of my favourite songs to record. It was fun,” she said, as the conversation transitioned to talk about a subject that is far less intimate and far more pervasive – social media, and the ‘must listen’ track, ‘Instagram.’
“Social media is such a hard thing to navigate whether it’s on a personal level or career level. I feel like I have a problem with it about both. Career-wise, it’s happened to me so many times where I had something exciting to announce, but then the same day, the Juno Award nominations are announced and I’m not nominated. So then I figure, well what I announced doesn’t matter anymore, and I feel like I’m worthless. It’s so hard, because we compare ourselves to one another in our personal lives and our careers through social media. I don’t want to do that. I have names in my head that I’m not going to name of other artists who are about my age who are about in the same place as me, and I’m like, ‘why are they going faster that me? Why do they have that? Why don’t I have that?’ All of that is so exhausting because in the end I am really, genuinely happy for them, and I want to be happy for them. And I have things too, I’ve done cool things too and I need to be happy for myself. But we’re constantly on these apps where we’re comparing each other, comparing our physiques and comparing it to something that’s just not real.
“I was watching a video the other day on TikTok of a famous makeup influencer that I follow. And she made this long video talking about how being an influencer is so fake, and I love that she made that video. She’s one of the top influencers on TikTok and she was saying that, look, everything you see online is probably fake. Don’t be fooled. And it was a breath of fresh air to hear someone like her say that because it’s so true. And we try to achieve this version of ourselves through these apps and it’s just unattainable, and all it does is leave you with this feeling of failure over and over. The idea for ‘Instagram’ came at the end of the pandemic for me because, as I said, I lived alone and I spent so much time on my phone, and it really affected me. Still today, sometimes I have to take breaks. During December, I actually deleted all the apps because I needed a break, and I felt so much better, I slept so much better. But this stuff is part of my job as well, so I have to learn to balance things out, which is not easy.”
‘Home Movies’ is another song of introspection and self-questioning – and to a degree is also about comparisons. In this instance, Racette is wondering if the person she is, the vocation that she has chosen, the simultaneous personal and career arcs of her life thus far, are what her family had expected. In other words, is she making her parents proud, something that most people wonder about at some point in their lives.
“That’s a song that randomly came to me. It’s not one that I planned. I was working on the music video for ‘Same Old Me,’ which features all this archival footage of me when I was a kid. My dad had all over these DVD’s that were previously VHS tapes and I spent a lot of time watching them, looking for parts to include in the music video. It was like I dove back into the past, seeing my parents at my age on those videos with three little kiddies, and seeing people that are not with us anymore. Seeing my cousins and my grandparents when they were my parents age now – it all blew my mind, and brought me to a very nostalgic place. And I was like, ‘okay, I have to write something about this. This is pretty deep.’ And the song is definitely for my parents,” she said.
“That’s who I’m talking to in the song, because as I was looking at all these videos of me playing the piano as a kind, I knew my parents have always supported me in music. They always wanted me to go for it. They saw that I had talent, and they pushed me towards music. So there’s always been a small part of me who wondered, ‘Am I where they thought I would be? Am I who they thought I would be? Are they disappointed?’ And that’s rough because, you know, I’m 35 now. I don’t have children, I don’t want children. My life is good. I like my life, but I still sometimes wonder what they think, deep down. So ‘Home Movies’ is me reflecting on my life overall, but talking to my parents through a song.”
Most of the buzz about the Deluxe reissue of Golden has come from the startlingly sparse, but brilliantly emotive cover of ‘Come As You Are,’ – song whose meaning and tone fits in adroitly with all of Racette’s original compositions.
“There’s a couple of reasons. The first reason why I would cover Nirvana is because Nirvana is the music that I listened to when I was a teenager, and there’s always something special about the music we listened to when we were teenagers, right? We develop a relationship with those songs, and it’s such an angsty time for us, so these songs became even more important. So Nirvana, and whatever else I used to listen to when I was a teenager always brings me back to the simplicity of music as just being music, and not being my job. I still have an amazing relationship with music. It’s still my whole life. But that relationship has evolved throughout the years. Now, when I sit down to sing, there’s a purpose, there’s a reason. I have a show, I have an interview, I have to do a video. It’s rarer and rarer now that I just sing for fun. So the songs that I listened to when I was a teenager bring me back to that feeling,” she explained.
“And the second reason why I chose this song is I had already covered it back in 2016. It was a very acoustic version that I recorded in a church. When we were about to head out touring, I bought this harmonizer keyboard thing for my vocals, which has kind of a vocoder effect. You play the notes and your voice is split into the chords your playing. And I did that just because I wanted to try something different and have a little fun. When I first sat down to try it out, I started to sing ‘Come As You Are,’ because I guess it was like being in a comfort zone for me. And I realized it sounded pretty cool. So I brought this new version to the band, and they loved it and said we should do it. We built the song with the trio and brought it on tour and I realized people really liked it and thought we should record it.”
It is an unfortunate aspect of the music business, the music industry, the behind-the-scenes aspects of writing, recording and releasing musical art, is still male dominated – even as we move into the second half of the third decade of the 21st century. Racette has consciously and strategically chosen to align herself as an artist with as many women and women-identifying music industry professionals as possible.
“It was literally like an epiphany one day. I had a completely different team before. It was mostly Quebec-based and we were trying to make things work in Quebec, and it didn’t work for me very well. It still doesn’t work for me here in Quebec, so I mostly tour outside of the province. Anyways, that team at first wasn’t the right fit for me. One day I sat down and it just came to me that every time I’m talking abut my career to someone, I’m the only woman in the room. It’s always a bunch of dudes. And that happens whether it’s a business meeting, whether I’m headed to a show and it’s the sound guy, the lighting guy even my band – it’s all guys. Suddenly it hit me that I don’t have to do it that way. I’m in control, and I want to work with more women, and I slowly started to switch my team around. It wasn’t working anyway, so I didn’t stop working with the other team because they were men. It wasn’t working out. I broke my contract and then started anew,” she said.
“I had no one left, no booking agent, no manager, no label. I was literally by myself, and I was like, ‘okay, what do I want?’ I had an opportunity to be able to rebuild my team, and so I started to work with my manager Jacynthe [Plamondon] and she’s a big-time feminist. I talked to her about this a lot and she thought it was a great idea to build a team with as many women as possible. I still work with some men, of course. My producer [François-Pierre Lue] is my best friend, and I’m not going to stop working with him because he’s a man. It’s just about giving women the opportunity because the women are there. They’re in the music industry, they’re just waiting to be hired. And they are more than competent. Also, touring with women is a very different experience than touring with men. Sharing a hotel room with a woman road manager, or roadie, or publicist, is different than sharing a hotel with a man. It’s a comforting feeling to be amongst women. There’s a different energy there as well. We are all so hungry, and it feels good. I’m going to keep going it as much as I can, and I encourage other artists to think about that as well. So many times I go see shows and there may be three or four bands on the bill and literally zero women onstage, zero women backstage working. This is 2026, like, let’s make an effort.
“That’s why Avril Lavigne was such a big deal to me. The reason why I’m here today playing guitar and singing is because of Avril Lavigne. I was I think 11 years old and I saw Avril Lavigne on MuchMusic and I remember thinking, ‘she’s cool. She’s not a girly girl, and I’m not a girly girl. I could be like her. I could sing. I could play the guitar like her.’ My first guitar was an electric guitar that was a cheaper version of hers. And then I learned about Alanis Morissette and Sarah McLachlan and all these women who I was seeing on stage, it really did make me think that I could do that too. So, I think putting more women up front and behind the scenes in positions of power, of not just throwing token women artists onto bills, but prioritizing them and put them at the top of the bill, is important.”
Currently in writing mode for her next album, Racette’s first show of 2026 sees her crossing the Atlantic into Eastern Europe for a performance at Tallinn Music Week in Estonia, before a run through the U.K. and France in May. Dates closer to home are in the works.
For more information on tour dates, updates on new music, and Golden (Deluxe) visit https://genevieveracette.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at bigjim1428@hotmail.com.
