The World of Elisapie

North of North is a delightful CBC-produced comedy based in a fictional indigenous community of northern Canada. It centers Inuk culture, including food, music, clothing and sports. The music was mostly unfamiliar to us and did not really draw my attention until the seventh episode of the first season (insert optimism that CBC is working on another season). 

Near the end of the episode, a melody that had been in the background grew a bit stronger and then we realized it was familiar. We were hearing the lilting strains of Stevie Nicks, but in the voice of Inuk singer Elisapie. This of course, sent me to the interwebs to learn more. 

First: was this really a cover of the Fleetwood Mac song Dreams? Yes, it was. 

Second: how and why? I'll let her explain, in this wonderful 10-minute interview on the CBC program The National. 

Elisapie tells her story -- including Blondie's reaction to her work -- in a bit more detail in a longer interview on the ATPN program Face to Face. 

And now, some of her music. Please treat yourself to her first NPR Tiny Desk concert. She and her band look like some kind of jazz ensemble, but they do some extraordinary things with these ordinary instruments. 

Following that, I suggest her album Inuktitut, named for the language in which she covers ten English-language songs that will be familiar to many in the UK and North America. I created a playlist on Spotify that begins with all ten tracks and then continues with the original versions. I thought first about presenting them in a back-and-forth fashion, but I decided not to interupt the flow of her album that way. Listeners can, of course, move around this list as they see fit.

As she mentions in the interviews, there is also an official video for each of the tracks on Inuktitut -- for example, the tundra transect set to Sinnatuumait (Dreams). Find all of the videos on her Inuktituk playlist on YouTube. Each offers a very different vision of life in the far north. 

For more, keep exploring at ELISAPIE.COM!

More Tracks

After playing my Inuktikut playlist in the car this morning, Spotify went to Ikiaqqik, a vaguely familiar song by Riit. Searching for that title (and eschewing various offers to search for Ikea instead), I found "Riit Reimagines Pop" on the Rising Indigenous Voices Radio (RIVR) blog, and learned that it is an English-to-Inuktikut cover that was featured in the same series, in this case based on a Dua Lipa song, Levitating (which itself is closing in on one billion YouTube views). 

I also learned that Netflix has done us the service of putting 47 songs from North of North on a single Spotify playlist, about 2.5 hours long.

Lagniappe

The "we" above is my spouse and I. Pamela is an observant librarian and Cindy Lauper fan. She noticed two things about North of North that I did not. 

The first is that she recognized the melody of "Time After Time" in the second episode. It is on Elisapie's album of covers. 

The second is that one of the characters is an elder named Elisapee, played by the Iñupiaq actress, activist, and language teacher Nutaaq Simmonds. The spelling is only slightly different from that used by the singer.