9/23/25 ADDS
CURRENT
UPCOMING
RECENT
LIVE
ABOUT
LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON
Live Like The Sky(You’ve Changed Records)
Add date: 10.28.2025
Release date: 10.24.2025
Links:
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
Live Like The Sky is an act of re-worlding, a record of struggle, a nuanced and complex shoreline combining a surprising influence from formative alternative musics with a vital Nishnaabe presence to create a fugitive and expansive space of relationship and affirmation. The album is the first new musical work from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson since her Polaris Music Prize short-listed Theory Of Ice in 2021, and joins a growing body of emergent creations from the Michi Saagig Nishinaabeg writer, scholar, artist, including the recently published Theory Of Water: Nishnaabe Maps To The Times Ahead, the letter-exchange-as-manifesto Rehearsals For Living (with Robin Maynard), the novel Noopiming, and essay/lecture/collaboration with beavers, A Short History Of The Blockade. Present in all of these is a deep engagement and response to the world, the wild fire smoke, the genocides, the driving fascism.
Musically, Live Like The Sky draws directly from Simpson’s personal history, growing up in rural southwestern Ontario and discovering alternative music, punk, new wave, and goth through the static and poor reception of the distant alternative station broadcasting from Toronto; this music offered an escape from the ubiquitous country music and hard rock, offered difference, offered possibility; offered an otherwise. On previous albums, music was written to completed poetry, here Simpson inverts the process, writing lyrics and vocal lines to songs guided by those formative musical influences. It was a process of developing her own voice and sound. In the struggle to arrive at this artistic vision she credits Status/Non-Status and Zoon, as well as their collaborative Ombiigizi project, with finding the sound that lands in our present moment as both a rebellion and a homespace. As the material was workshopped and developed in studio with Jonas Bonnetta, Caylie Runciman, Ansley Simpson, Tanner Pare and Nick Ferrio, artistic decisions were labored over, and in the space between the aesthetics of the lyrics and the aesthetics of the music, Live Like the Sky was born, carrying the undercurrents of resistance alongside a celebration of (still) being here anyway. There was dancing in the studio during playback.
White Kites and Blue Sky opens with what sounds like a drum machine, a simple, small beat. A statement of fact: the persistence of colonialism, the destructions of resource extraction, the corruption of western politics. The song grows in complexity as it progresses. Undercurrents of melody, layers of sound accumulating as a sounding of hope, of defiance, of growing. Niizhoziibing maps a reconnection of friends after the separations of the pandemic, capturing the relief of meeting again, of sharing space, of sharing place. Murder of Crows dances courageously, anthem and protest, the unbounded joy of singing “no god no boss no husband no state”.
No Line Could Make Sense Of It takes us to the shore, the overlapping worlds of water, land, and sky. It is spoken and then sung at a border holding incredible diversity and complexity. Requiring the energy of diplomacy. Disintegrations is a slow huge epic, a re-building from thunderous silence, imagining an expansion of imagination, enacting a rebirth of possibility.
85 Dollars An Acre, a collaboration with Steven Lambke, is a map, from the shores of Lake Ontario to the banks of the Otonabe River; it is a love song, a practice of care; it is a series of survival tips from the Elders on living through the catastrophe. It makes the most of small sounds.
Ossuary excavates a relationship that encloses, building to a crescendo of “trusting you with nothing”. When it’s Her Turn To Speak she says “you’ve come a long way”, she says “keep at it”. An echo of “No Line Could Make Sense Of It” is heard and repeated. Minode’e is an invitation. Sung in a vocabulary particular to Alderville First Nation, Minode’e is a remembering of language, an expression of care.
The effort needed to preserve can take you to the point of loss. Pyrrhic Victories describes the risks, the physical and emotional challenges, of recovery. It rises. It learns to surf. It finds some kind of stability on the wave. Not solid, but riding, living. An impossible pop song, holding balance in chaos.
In our present moment of live-streamed genocide, fascism, and climate catastrophe, this record is a beacon and a reminder to not shrink our imaginations into constrained versions of the possible, to remember the sky, the shore, the horizon. It is a call towards living life in an expansive way, in a way that is relational, is connected, in a network that springs forth more life. It is a reminder to dance.
Spending time at the shoreline is a flight to the sky. This record is a living archive of resistance, fugitivity, and emergence.
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
Live Like The Sky is an act of re-worlding, a record of struggle, a nuanced and complex shoreline combining a surprising influence from formative alternative musics with a vital Nishnaabe presence to create a fugitive and expansive space of relationship and affirmation. The album is the first new musical work from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson since her Polaris Music Prize short-listed Theory Of Ice in 2021, and joins a growing body of emergent creations from the Michi Saagig Nishinaabeg writer, scholar, artist, including the recently published Theory Of Water: Nishnaabe Maps To The Times Ahead, the letter-exchange-as-manifesto Rehearsals For Living (with Robin Maynard), the novel Noopiming, and essay/lecture/collaboration with beavers, A Short History Of The Blockade. Present in all of these is a deep engagement and response to the world, the wild fire smoke, the genocides, the driving fascism.
Musically, Live Like The Sky draws directly from Simpson’s personal history, growing up in rural southwestern Ontario and discovering alternative music, punk, new wave, and goth through the static and poor reception of the distant alternative station broadcasting from Toronto; this music offered an escape from the ubiquitous country music and hard rock, offered difference, offered possibility; offered an otherwise. On previous albums, music was written to completed poetry, here Simpson inverts the process, writing lyrics and vocal lines to songs guided by those formative musical influences. It was a process of developing her own voice and sound. In the struggle to arrive at this artistic vision she credits Status/Non-Status and Zoon, as well as their collaborative Ombiigizi project, with finding the sound that lands in our present moment as both a rebellion and a homespace. As the material was workshopped and developed in studio with Jonas Bonnetta, Caylie Runciman, Ansley Simpson, Tanner Pare and Nick Ferrio, artistic decisions were labored over, and in the space between the aesthetics of the lyrics and the aesthetics of the music, Live Like the Sky was born, carrying the undercurrents of resistance alongside a celebration of (still) being here anyway. There was dancing in the studio during playback.
White Kites and Blue Sky opens with what sounds like a drum machine, a simple, small beat. A statement of fact: the persistence of colonialism, the destructions of resource extraction, the corruption of western politics. The song grows in complexity as it progresses. Undercurrents of melody, layers of sound accumulating as a sounding of hope, of defiance, of growing. Niizhoziibing maps a reconnection of friends after the separations of the pandemic, capturing the relief of meeting again, of sharing space, of sharing place. Murder of Crows dances courageously, anthem and protest, the unbounded joy of singing “no god no boss no husband no state”.
No Line Could Make Sense Of It takes us to the shore, the overlapping worlds of water, land, and sky. It is spoken and then sung at a border holding incredible diversity and complexity. Requiring the energy of diplomacy. Disintegrations is a slow huge epic, a re-building from thunderous silence, imagining an expansion of imagination, enacting a rebirth of possibility.
85 Dollars An Acre, a collaboration with Steven Lambke, is a map, from the shores of Lake Ontario to the banks of the Otonabe River; it is a love song, a practice of care; it is a series of survival tips from the Elders on living through the catastrophe. It makes the most of small sounds.
Ossuary excavates a relationship that encloses, building to a crescendo of “trusting you with nothing”. When it’s Her Turn To Speak she says “you’ve come a long way”, she says “keep at it”. An echo of “No Line Could Make Sense Of It” is heard and repeated. Minode’e is an invitation. Sung in a vocabulary particular to Alderville First Nation, Minode’e is a remembering of language, an expression of care.
The effort needed to preserve can take you to the point of loss. Pyrrhic Victories describes the risks, the physical and emotional challenges, of recovery. It rises. It learns to surf. It finds some kind of stability on the wave. Not solid, but riding, living. An impossible pop song, holding balance in chaos.
In our present moment of live-streamed genocide, fascism, and climate catastrophe, this record is a beacon and a reminder to not shrink our imaginations into constrained versions of the possible, to remember the sky, the shore, the horizon. It is a call towards living life in an expansive way, in a way that is relational, is connected, in a network that springs forth more life. It is a reminder to dance.
Spending time at the shoreline is a flight to the sky. This record is a living archive of resistance, fugitivity, and emergence.