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FONTINE
Good Buddy(Birthday Cake Records)
Add date: 10.14.2025
Release date: 10.7.2025
“Good Buddy” is CB Radio code for gay, so it’s a fitting title for FONTINE’s first full-length album. Like a truck driver on the radio, she is a road warrior logging shows all year with her own project or as a collaborator with Boy Golden, Kris Ulrich, Begonia, Georgia Harmer and so many others. And while that trucker-hat-wearing, big-rig-wielding archetype might not usually be associated with soft sensitivity, that middle zone is exactly where FONTINE and this album live. It's a rock record with a mushy middle. It's beautiful and energizing. There's pain and there's catharsis.
FONTINE is Indigenous, queer and a self-proclaimed “real goofy guy.” These things all inform her art. She is the life of the party, her magnanimous laugh and smile filling up any room. But there's also a lot of struggle behind all that. Navigating through relationships beginning and ending, identity exploration, self-doubt, activist frustration, people pleasing and friendship – all rooted in a real sense of place. This is what the album is all about.
Good Buddy is a departure from FONTINE’s breakout Yarrow Lover EP, which leaned into cleaner, folkier singer-songwriter tones. This record finds her back with her trademark powerhouse voice and disarmingly vulnerable approach, but this time housed in a grittier shell. FONTINE always wanted to be a rock star growing up, listening to rock radio and singing along full tilt. This album is a step towards that dream. Recorded live to tape, the intention was to be as raw and scrappy as possible, with her band in the room feeding off the energy they’d gathered from hundreds of shows on the road. All to allow the beautiful, raw songwriting to shine through.
“Body Double” is a fan favourite singalong at live shows with its half-time, harmony-stacked chorus. It explores the idea of sharing space with others to help you focus on the task at hand and more broadly, about physically manifesting the support of your friends and loved ones in hard times. “Night Hours” channels Neil Young’s guitar-driven, lip-bitten grit trying to get over a now gone lover. “Current” is a life-preserver – a landing spot to put all the sadness you feel like you didn’t want to bother anyone with, because it’s just too damn sad.
And then there is "Home Right Here," an exploration of the places FONTINE is rooted to, along with associated core memories that formed who she is. Between rich choruses she takes us somewhere new with each verse – the family farm on Cowessess First Nation, an escape to a tiny Vancouver apartment, and Jimmy's place on Braemar – a makeshift garage hang spot during the height of pandemic lockdowns where her Winnipeg musician pals would gather to drink and write and dream.
Up until now, on the strength of just one EP, FONTINE has garnered over 800,000 streams, a loyal online following, glowing press from CBC, Country Queer, Exclaim!, RANGE and more, radio charting success, plus support slots with folks like William Prince, The Paper Kites, and Helena Deland. Good Buddy plants her next route marker on the side of the road. It peels back the layers and puts her heart and her grit centre stage. It poises her to expand her reach, carve out new highways, and fully put her behind the wheel.