By Jim Barber
There’s a viscerally fierce and insistent energy imbuing the songs on Newfoundland native singer/songwriter Damhnait Doyle’s new EP, Bird In Flames.
After seemingly shifting away from her musical career for other pathways, including a full-time hosting gig with CBC Radio, the opportunity to work with JUNO Award-winning engineer/producer Hill Kourkoutis, as well as some pretty seismic, life-altering events in her personal life, Doyle began writing and recording new music and noticed a remarkable and demonstrable shift in her approach, her motivation and her expectations.
A solo artist of some significance in the late 1990s and early 2000s, she also combined creative forces with fellow East Coasters Tara MacLean and Kim Stockwood to form the folk-infused trio, Shaye, and later the indie rock band The Heartbroken, acting as a vocalist, instrumentalist and songwriter for all these wonderfully diverse and dynamic projects.
Eschewing the normal desire for clicks, streams, mentions, and other online ‘success,’ as well as rejecting any sense of pretence and, frankly, any filters, Bird In Flames is as stridently potent as it is melodically engaging. From the initial single, ‘Darlin’’ through robustly affirming, ‘Bad Bad Women,’ Doyle has made her return to music on her own terms, unencumbered by the expectations of others and with a bold freedom to express what she wants, how she wants, and as caustically honest as she wants.
Music Life Magazine’s Jim Barber enjoyed catching up with Doyle over Zoom recently. The interview has been slightly edited for the sake of clarity and flow.
MLM – Now that you’ve released a couple of singles and the EP is on the way, is your rock star/recording artist muscle memory all back full on? Or it’s more like ‘I felt like doing this now, because I had something to say.’
DD – I’ll tell you what happened. I’m going to be very honest with you. My long time manager of over two decades, Sherry Jones got cancer. I had started recording a few songs about two and a half years ago, and then of course, with life, I didn’t do anything with them for two years. When Sherry was diagnosed, Kim Stockwood from Shaye said to Sherry, ‘Sherry, every time you do chemo, I’m going to release a story.’
I said to Sherry, ‘that’s brilliant. I’m so glad you did that. What a good idea. Now Kim is going to have to do it and collect those stories.’ She said, ‘what about your music?’ And I was like, oh, okay. So then I was committed; I committed to Sherry that I would finish this EP. When I do things my brain won’t allow me to do it in half measures, but it was challenging for me to carve out the mental space to finish the EP and do it well, the way I wanted to do it.
At Christmas, I just hunkered down, and I finished the EP with my friend and great producer Hill Kourkoutis. And every step of the way, honestly, from mixing to getting pictures and everything, it felt like a tremendous amount of effort because before when I was doing this, it would be my only focus. But now I have two children and a full-time job. That muscle was like dormant for a very long time. But once you pick up the eight pound weights and you do a couple of dumbbell curls, it’s like, oh yeah, it’s there. And now I’m very much itching to sing and get up and play. I haven’t had that feeling in seven years.
MLM – So you hadn’t really been doing much writing up until Sherry’s sort of challenge to you – or at all?
DD – Not songwriting, no. I probably had not written a song for myself in seven years. Or maybe five years from when I started this batch.
MLM – Was part of that just because there was that minor little disturbance called COVID that sort of threw everybody’s life into a tizzy? Or is there more to it than that? Does it have more to do with what the music business has become in the years since COVID?
DD – I don’t think people really realise the state of the music industry financially, in terms of artists, not just Canadian artists, artists from the UK and the US too. It is unsustainable. And in a few years when no Canadian musicians are playing and we can’t go see their concerts, we’re going to go, ‘oh, what happened?’ It’s like, well, this is what happened: nobody can afford to be a musician in this country anymore.
MLM – So what’s the solution from your point of view?
DD – I mean, it’s a bit like the toothpaste is out of the tube at this point. Unfortunately, different governments that we had just did not catch this quickly enough. Bureaucracy, I think, was a big reason why artists are not paid in this country. There certainly was an incredible amount of lobbying from the Canadian music industry to monetize streaming for artists, for songwriters, and it just didn’t happen. People don’t value music. People will go to a sold-out show at Scotiabank Amphitheater, or whatever it’s called, not only spend hundreds of dollars per ticket, but they’re also going to then spend $80 on a T-shirt.
It’s a lack of awareness. It’s a lack of education of what’s really going on here. And on my radio show, I’m always talking about how expensive things are. I’m always encouraging people to buy the merch, buy the vinyl, go buy a ticket. I think that’s the only way to save it.
MLM – I think it’s a broader cultural issue relating to a lot of things like this. The first time I talked to you; I was working in the newspaper industry. Where’s that gone? That’s why I have a real empathy and a real almost mission on my own to do my part to promote original music and live music and help creators.
I’m very frustrated and scared because it does parallel what happened in my career, but also because of, and I want to get to this a bit later, about just what the importance of the role of art and music in the world is these days. Although there was sort of a real personal impetus behind this new EP, based on what we’ve been talking about for the last few minutes, what is your purpose of writing and recording and releasing new material? And how has that motivation changed over the last 30 years?
DD – I think it’s changed tremendously. And it did change significantly because of COVID. I was always somebody who was very storytelling-first focused, lyric focused, lyric first, melody first, not so much track, not so much the production. I really was laser focused on the stories I wanted to tell. But during COVID, I don’t know what it was. I think I enjoyed having time on my own, honestly, being insular. And it gave me a time to be way less self-conscious. All I wanted to do after the pandemic was dance. And I have been someone who has never done that, I’m just not a dancer.
I’m not somebody who’s going to get on the dance floor, feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. And I made the EP because I wanted to make music that was going to make me dance, that’s going to make my body move, and going to make other people want to move. And that is not what people are expecting from me. I know this because I wasn’t expecting it for myself, but I really wanted to go vibe first. Not to say that the stories aren’t important. They, they are, but it’s the vibe that I was going for.
So Hill and I sat down, and we mapped out a bunch of things, like for me, of where I wanted to go – the Cardigans, War on Drugs. I wanted to make that type of music. So yeah, that is my motivation with this record, honestly, is to release things, to dance, to move my body and to get out of my head.
MLM – Before I forget to ask, how is Sherry?
DD – Yeah, she’s doing very well.
MLM – What else has been rattling around up there in your head or going on in your life that has also led to this sort of mindset of, or has it just been COVID and post-COVID?
DD – Well, in terms of the type of music, that was just something that shifted in me in COVID. Now I’m that person. Now I’m like, I don’t necessarily want to go see a concert with someone with a guitar by themselves singing songs. I’m personally not interested in that right now. And I’m not really interested in me being that person either. I don’t necessarily want to play guitar on stage. That’s something I’ve always kind of had as a shield. Honestly, my guitar, like a bit of armor. I just want to get up on stage and just be and not think, not activate my head, not for one second, not go, oh, ‘is that an F sharp or what’s coming up in the bridge?’ I don’t want to think. I want to just get up there and be.
And actually every time I’ve played since COVID, whether I get up somewhere and sing one song or two songs or sing backgrounds, like for me, I’m never getting on another stage again, unless I know I can bring 150 per cent of what I can possibly offer, which was never really, like, my ethos before. I just want to be in the moment. I’m doing it for myself, for my own gratification, if that makes any sense. I want to have a good time. It was never in my list of things of what was important to me about music was for me to have a good time on stage. It wasn’t that.
So and I realized that that is the key to honestly bringing people in too, is when you’re 100 per cent authentic. I don’t care if people look at me and go like, you know, ‘what is she doing? She’s just enjoying herself way too much. Shouldn’t she take this a bit more seriously? Shouldn’t she be doing a guitar solo or something?’
MLM – Interesting. So what was rattling on in your head during the creative process, and did that come out in a thematic approach to these songs or are they all their own entities that you discovered later had some connective tissue between them?
DD – They’re all their own entities, but it’s really the production and the music that ties them all together. I am telling kind of an arc of a story of changes in my life. You know, I was married for a long time. I have two kids. That marriage ended three years ago. That was a very seismic shift in my life. Very, very painful. And I just finally now, three years later, feel like I’m somewhat on the other side of it. These songs are kind of me finding my way through such a really all-encompassing experience. So there’s like an arc of a story in there.
MLM – I see that and can hear that. ‘Darlin’’ and ‘Bad Bad Women,’ they just, in your voice, in the words, in the lyrics, it just has that sort of message of you know, you’ve run out of f**** to give.
DD – In every sort of aspect, they have left the station. Being a female musician who started out in the industry, you know, when it’s like, you’d read a magazine article now about all these awful things, stuff that was very commonplace for women in this industry 30 years ago. It’s a whole, whole different thing. And I really had to work out a lot of those things in therapy and kind of come to it from the correct perspective.
With ‘Darlin’,’ that was me singing to myself. The kid who I was going through this separation, who I was when my kids were young, who I am now, who I’m going to be. The good thing about going through a lot of hardship is that you really find out what you’re made of. And I’m telling you, I am made of malleable steel, but steel, nonetheless. And it’s malleable only when I want to change it now, which feels pretty good. Honestly, I just want to be happy.
My mom had Alzheimer’s, and she lived with me for a bunch of the pandemic before she went into a home specific for dementia. When she passed away, it’s going to be four years this fall, that was an absolute ‘aha’ moment for me. I was like, ‘how many years do I have left? What do I want to do with that time?’ I know I don’t want to waste not one little second of it. And Jim, I’ve got to say that totally informed where I am today.
I had this thought the other day, actually, it was kind of a morbid thought, but I was thinking, I wonder who would come to my funeral? Which is a really good way of putting things in order. And I will say at this point, I’ve got everybody who I would want to come to my funeral, coming to my funeral. It was really this time during COVID and after my mom died, where you put everything in its place, where you say to yourself, that behavior or that person or that thing is dragging me down. Sorry, it’s just not serving me.
MLM – What feedback have you been getting from people who are hearing the songs? And what are you hoping people take on to themselves from these songs?
DD – Well, I’ve got to say, just based on the music alone, I’ve had the strongest feedback of my career. I’ve had so many people reaching out to me saying, ‘I love this song. I love this song.’ And that’s been super validating for me because I think at this point to be, you know, a chart topping artist, you’ve got to dedicate hours and hours every day to social media. I have zero interest in that. I will never have interest in that. That is not me. I’m not comfortable videoing myself going, hi. I just, honestly, it goes against everything I was raised with.
There’s this weird line of humility and humbleness – it’s a speed bump for me that in the past has been hard for me to get over. And now I’m just like, look, if I want to do something, I’ll do it. Social media-wise, I don’t. I have a full-time job. I have two kids. I’m a single mother half the time. I’m not gonna go and play shows to 10 people for the next five years.
Those days are over for me. So I have very realistic views on what could potentially happen with my music as a 50-year-old woman. And it’s funny because this is the saddest part about it all. I truly believe if you are an artist and you are able to persevere and stick around, you’re gonna get better. You’re gonna get better and better and better.
There are very few exceptions to that rule. And I know musically and singing-wise, I am a million times better when I had the biggest hit I had on the radio. A million times better. But I’m also at a stage in my life where that doesn’t matter to me. Would it be nice to have a viral hit single? Yeah, sure. It’d be great.
MLM – How has the actual technical process of writing songs changed for you? Or has it? Do you sit down and with a pad of paper, or do you record ideas into your phone?
DD – With ‘Bad Bad Women’ I wrote that on my bed with my journal and a pencil in 20 minutes. And that’s the first time I had done that in 10, 15 years, because obviously, everybody uses voice memos to capture ideas or capture lyrical ideas. With a lot of these other songs, I had a very thought out lyrical idea. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and then Hill and I would write music, and she’d help me shape, say what the chorus is, like, we’d shape the lyrics of the idea I brought in together. So in that aspect that didn’t change.
I just loved working with Hill, because when we started, I’ve always had a very tight grip on how I wanted something to sound mostly, honestly, because I had some really challenging experiences when I was young working with record labels, where might record something, and then they’re remixed to high heavens, and you don’t recognize it. So since then, I’m controlling what this sounds like.
And with Hill, because I’ve known her for so long, for decades actually, and I trust her, she’s like a family member to me, I said, you know what, Hill, with this, I’m going to let go of the reins a little bit, musically here, production wise and I followed her lead. Later we would finesse things, like the song ‘Ready Now,’ [just released as a single/video] that had a completely different production on it, a year ago, like completely different. We went back to the well, until I was completely satisfied with it. And now it’s my favorite song. So yeah, we really, we labored over this. If I paid Hill a million dollars to do this EP, there’s no way I paid her enough. Let’s put it that way.
MLM – So many people I know and have written about have worked with her. What is it about her that makes her special as a collaborator?
DD – First of all, she’s a wonderful human being. She cares about how people are feeling. She is not led by her ego. In fact, she might be one of the most egoless people I’ve ever met. But also, look, what people don’t know about Hill is that in high school, she was a child actor. She was on a TV show called Radio Free Roscoe. And then she started her own solo thing. And then she went back to school, and then she became a video director. She just kept learning and learning. She’s so smart.
MLM – It’s kind of annoying, actually [Laughs]
DD – Yeah, it is. It’s annoying. It’s like, how do you know all this stuff about all these things? But honestly, our sessions would start, she would say, what do you want me to make you? She’d make me a decaf cappuccino. And we’d sit and we’d talk about our families and all that stuff, and then all of a sudden, we’d be diving into it. The writing of the songs came very, very, very easily.
MLM – How did ‘Bad Bad Women’ actually come together? It’s pretty damn anthemic, as they say in the media biz.
DD – Honestly, I think women are pissed. I’ve been pissed for a long time, honestly. And I’m not really allowed to talk politics, because of my job. I have to adhere to journalistic standards of practice. So this is what I can say. That song was directly inspired by one of our world leaders telling a prominent female journalist to smile. And it just enraged me. And I sat down, I wrote this song.
There’s something about the level of misogyny that is not even, under wraps. It’s just so far out there that people find it normal, that it’s acceptable for now. We’re back in the dark ages, man. It’s like Handmaid’s Tale. It’s crazy. There is also such a level of internalized misogyny with women because that’s what you’re taught. That’s what you’re shown. You think, ‘how can I make everybody around me comfortable? How can everybody look at me as I’m the nice person?’ Nobody likes the disruptor. Nobody likes the person who tells the truth. In a room where nobody else is doing that, everybody wants to keep status quo, keep peace. And I get that because I spent a lot of time searching for peace in my life.
I’m telling you, these things come up and I just, I get so enraged. And I thought perhaps that was a bad thing. But I had two women who I know who are brilliant. I was talking to them about this, and they were like, ‘yeah, but rage is such a powerful tool when used correctly.’ So pretty much every woman I know is really enraged and really angry at this world.
Well, like, for me, it’s like writing this song, ‘Bad Bad Women,’ and releasing it. That’s what I’m doing to try and combat it, because there are a lot of men who truly cannot see and do not believe that in certain areas of work, that it’s harder for women. It just is. You don’t have to believe it. It’s just true. You know, look at the pay gap still. We’re in 2026.
When I started, I had a label get me a personal trainer. My first photo shoot ever, when I was 17 or 18 years old, the photographer told me not to eat anything but broccoli for two weeks, you know, which I did. I was very young and felt I had to go along with it. It was not a good scene, you know what I mean? But today, try. Yeah. Just try me. Try me and watch out what’s gonna happen, you know?
I’m very lucky in my workplace now, there’s a lot of women in leadership here at the CBC. So I’m not personally experiencing that in my current life. In this country there are a tremendous amount of very capable, smart, hardworking women in leadership. But I’ve had many experiences where I was in boardrooms and I knew when I was speaking up, people were not liking what I was saying, because I was speaking the hard truth. I have ADHD, so it’s really easy for me to come into a situation and really assess what’s going on.
It’s like a beginner’s mindset, but with advanced mapping and coding in my brain of how to figure out a business situation, a personal situation. It’s just part of my personality. And I would literally, after these meetings, go and get a bath and clutch my crystals, because it took a lot out of me to be the one who’s telling the truth.
And I know everybody in that room, or most people in that room are pissed off at me, because that is against who I was born as. I was born as somebody who cared a lot about what people thought of me, that was completely with me throughout my career, especially in my late teens, 20s, early 30s. I can’t remember where I shook it off, but I did at some point. And that takes a lot out of you, to be the one to tell the truth. But that’s who I am now.
MLM – But do you think music plays the same role that maybe it did when we were growing up, or even in the 60s, when it was sort of the voice of the voiceless in a lot of ways? What do you see as the role of music today?
DD – There’re all these people who say, ‘shut up and sing,’ whether it’s The Dixie Chicks or whomever, especially now, because it’s so politically divided. I actually believe it is the role of the artist to say the things that are challenging, that people are afraid to say. That’s the role of the artist. There is another role of the artist, which is to entertain. And if you are able to roll the two of them into one, that is it. For me, the ultimate thing is to have a message, but have it wrapped up in this bow that you don’t need to open the package if you don’t want to.
MLM – What is the role of music for you personally in terms of helping you process the good, the bad and the ugly of life? Is it that safety valve for you that if you didn’t have it, you’d be in a padded room or in court?
DD – I think I always used songwriting since the very beginning as my therapy. And then 12 years ago, when I started going to actual therapy, I didn’t need it for that anymore. But for this record, it absolutely was a situation where I had to get things out of me and things necessarily I wouldn’t even write in my own journal.
Yeah, it was very cathartic for me, and all the ideas came out very, very fast, like ‘Ready Now,’ the initial draft that I started on my own came out in 15 minutes, and then I brought it to Hill and finished it. And ‘Bird In Flames,’ which is the title song of the EP, is a song that I wrote with Hill and my friend Serena Ryder. But that was a similar thing because I had the idea of what I wanted to talk about, and the bulk of the melody and then it just flowed out from there in a very uncomfortable way. To my way of thinking, if you’re doing something as an artist and it’s uncomfortable or it scares you, then you’re doing the right thing.
MLM – I believe you have been able to balance all that, I think, with this record. It’s not a strident polemic. It’s not a bullhorn, but yet you were able to mesh the strong message, strong words, but within, like you said, a packaging where it doesn’t necessarily smack you in the face, but it definitely if you’re really listening, you’re going, ‘oh, OK, all right, there’s something deep and important here.’
DD – Now that you said that I hadn’t realized this before, but that’s exactly what I wanted from this record. I wanted to have several different layers. There’s the ‘move your body’ layer and then the, ‘oh, what’s happening here? Should Adele sing this song?’
MLM – I don’t know if I asked you this when we talked last time, but how did the CBC gig come along and what do you enjoy about it?
DD – Honestly, I have been fascinated with the medium of radio since I was a little kid just the same way you think, oh, we’re all looking at the same moon. Everybody was all listening at the same time. They’re having a collective experience. It’s the same reason why I like to go to yoga class. I am one of 20 in that class. We’re all doing the same thing.
With radio, I’m one of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, whatever, listening to the same song at the same time. I just feel like that is tremendously powerful and it’s something I always wanted to do. And I tried to kind of get my foot in the door here at CBC 10 years ago.
I remember putting together like an audition reel or something and it didn’t go anywhere. So the summer before COVID, I wrote an op-ed for the Toronto Star about me stopping drinking and realizing with that there were no non-alcoholic options for musicians at work. Why doesn’t this bar and this bar and this bar have a non-alcoholic beer? And that was seven years ago, this came out and everything is completely changed. I do feel pride in, in my kick-starting of that in the Canadian music industry.
The Junos immediately adopted non-alcoholic options, the Polaris Music Prize too. And that was 100 per cent because of this article that I wrote. And I went and I did an interview on [popular CBC Radio chat show] Here and Now, and the woman who kind of coordinates new talent here happened to be listening. She called the host, who’s my friend now and said, ‘do you think Damhnait could do this?’ And she was like, oh yeah, of course. Because I think before that there’s like, oh, she’s a musician.
They kind of trained me for like four months. At first I said, why don’t you send me a script and I’ll just do an audition from home. They told me that’s not how this works. She said, ‘I’m going to send you a list of 41 songs, and you have to research them and do about a minute story going into every second one.’ I didn’t realize that everybody here on the music side writes their own scripts. Nobody’s researching that stuff. Nobody’s doing anything for me. I get up and I write a whole three hour show every single day. The doing the show part is no sweat. It’s the research and the bulk of writing. I think that was a big reason why it took me a long time to complete this EP because I am writing three hours of copy, five days a week. Like it’s a lot.
I did my first show March 8, 2020, and then COVID happened. And I thought, I’m going to lose this opportunity. I was at home. My mother was living with us. She had Alzheimer’s. I had two young kids that I was trying to homeschool. And I emailed my contact at CBC. I said, if you ever need anyone to fill in, I can record from home. I’d never recorded from home ever before in my life. I had no equipment. Then I got a call. Can you fill in on the weekend mornings all summer? So two shows a week.
I was like, yes, of course. I was like, oh my God. So I went on Amazon, and I ordered all the equipment. I watched YouTube tutorials. I figured out how to do it. And I would record that show in my basement between 12 midnight and 2:30 a.m. At 12 o’clock, everybody would be in bed. And at 2:30, my mom generally would get up to either go to the bathroom or leave the house. So I’d be awake at 2:30 just to mitigate whatever was going to happen. Also, my next door neighbor had a renovation going on, so the only time that was quiet that I could record at home was between 12 and 2:30 a.m. It was baptism by fire, and the fact I pulled that off in those stressful circumstances and I learned how to do it, somebody who really thought they were not technically proficient, I figured it out. Now here it is six years later and I’m the morning show host of the national music show. It really just goes to show you can do anything you put your mind to.
For more information, visit https://damhnaitdoyle.com.
