On Chicago’s first truly autumnal day, Canadian singer-songwriter Haley Blais sat down with Radio DePaul preceding her set at Schubas Tavern, where she would be opening for soft rock duo Tommy Lefroy. Blais had just returned from thrifting at the iconic Brown Elephant Resale Shop in Lakeview, and enjoyed a dirty chai from Whole Foods while hanging out in Schuba’s greenroom, where she answered a few questions.
Blais got her start posting content to YouTube in 2013, amassing over 160K subscribers on the platform. “The first thing I posted was covers and stuff, so I think it was always brooding– the foundation was always music. I think I was just messing around doing other stuff and that’s what made people watch it, and then they just kind of carried on with me as I evolved and took myself more seriously as a musician– maybe not all of them, but a good amount of them, and it’s translating into shows, which is sweet,” said Blais. “I never saw myself doing YouTube the whole time. It feels like it has a shelf life at a certain point, doing stuff like that.”
Blais still connects with her fanbase from YouTube frequently, despite having moved away from that type of content. “I was just always posting random stuff that I never thought twice about… and now it’s like photoshoot[s], tour dates, song coming out– feels very calculated,” she explains, “I’m not used to that, but I’m more of a musician than I am a YouTuber now, in my opinion.”
Blais feels that her YouTube audience has gone on this journey with her, as she transitions from being a social media personality to a full time musician. “I feel like a lot of people that I meet, we share mannerisms. It’s strange, but I don’t know if that’s because maybe they follow me on YouTube or something, and so we’ve kind of grown together. I would say like 99% of people who come to shows… are also YouTube subscribers,” Blais said.
Blais also began her music career by studying classical voice, opposed to the indie-folk-pop that she performs today; “I still love classical music, I kind of wish that I kept up with it in some way, whether it was just singing it every once in awhile, even around the house, or like, things like that, but I’m sad that I’ve lost a little bit of my technique, I feel like I could’ve been a star!”
“I could’ve been a star, I just didn’t want to. It’s a lot more limiting, I think, creatively– obviously, because you’re singing other people’s music and it’s from typically, 1873, so it was not my cup of tea for how I wanted to express myself creatively… I still have a place for it in my heart, and I feel like if you get enough drinks in me I can sing ‘O mio babbino caro’, but not as good as I could’ve.” Blais’ favorite classical composer? “Mozart. He’s my boy.”
Currently, Blais is enjoying Genesis Owusu’s “STRUGGLER” – “[STRUGGLER is] very autumnal to me… I just want to be like, cruising in a wintery, blistery cold November night or October night, just the lights, and [Genesis Owusu].” Blais also recommends Nashville artist Wilby, who opened for Blais and Tommy Lefroy at Exit/In, “The lead vocalist’s voice sounds a lot like Faye Webster, it has this jazzy, lilting flip.”
Blais was accompanied by Lindsay Louelza on this tour, opposed to her full band, which joined her when she headlined Schubas Tavern in June. “It’s a very pared back set. I’ve been really liking playing ‘Baby Teeth,’ and also we do a chill version of a really old song of mine called ‘Small Foreign Faction,’ that one’s fun to play on the acoustic guitar,” said Blais. “Usually when we play it with the full band, I don’t do anything, I just like, do backflips on the stage and stuff, so it’s cool to ground it and play it the way I wrote it.”
Blais’ favorite memory from this tour was a day off in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where she visited the Titanic Museum; a half scale recreation of the original ship and extensive collection of Titanic memorabilia. Then, Blais and Louelza explored local bars—discovering they all closed at 10pm— and attempted to befriend a bartender to find out where they could keep drinking.
“He gave us free shots that were really bad,” Blais reminisced. “We drank a banana mudslide daiquiri, and then he told us to go to this one bar that the locals go to when they’re off work, and it was so cute… That was fun. I don’t get to do that on tour a lot, especially when I’m headlining. For a headlining tour, I feel like I’m not a real person at all– there’s so much going on in my head, and like, a bunch of people I have to make sure are having a good time, whereas this tour, it’s just been me and Lindsay and we’ve been just having so much time on our hands.”
Blais was also able to attend “All Things Go” in Columbia, Maryland with Tommy Lefroy — who were playing the festival — as well as Lollapalooza with Peach Pit. “We’ve been going to a lot of festivals where our friends are playing and we get to just hang out… I think for next year, the thing I want to do the most is play festivals, because I’ve only ever really done like, Canadian festivals, or like, small American festivals,” Blais said. “I love playing festivals more than anything. I think it’s the best way to play music to people who haven’t heard you before.”
Blais’ sophomore album, “Wisecrack”, was released a few weeks before her tour with Tommy Lefroy, for which She took inspiration from 90’s and 2000’s pop music, such as Sarah McLachlan and Sarah Harmer or any artist from Lilith Fair, as she explains “Those songs that you would hear in the back of the minivan when you’re a kid, that were on the radio, that stuck with me, and I didn’t realize they were so ingrained in me– like literally in my DNA, it feels like… it was just kind of, that era of me, growing up, and that music that was on the radio that I know every word to and have never heard.”
Blais sees “Wisecrack” as more of a concrete project than her previous release, “Below the Salt”, which served more as a compilation of songs she had written, “The writing process for this album was specifically different than anything else because it was so personal that I wrote it in like a big, concentrated spurt of like, three months collectively, maybe less. Maybe, actually, like three weeks,” Blais explained. “I almost wrote them chronologically… I definitely wanted to try to bookend it– feel like it has a beginning and that it changes and it has an end.”
For those unfamiliar with Blais’ work, she recommends the opening track on “Wisecrack”, “Soft spot for monarchs,” or “Coolest f*cking b*tch in town.”
“I think they’re both as nihilistic as you can get on the album. The rest are a little bit hopeful, or me trying to be introspective.”