Jeremy Dutcher speaks after winning the Polaris Music Prize at Massey Hall in Toronto on Sept. 17.Paige Taylor White/The Canadian Press
Jeremy Dutcher’s winning of the $50,000 Polaris Music Prize at Toronto’s Massey Hall on Tuesday got me to thinking about the history of the award, founded in 2006. It has been a long, odd trip.
In its earliest days, the prize was routinely criticized for obsessing over indie rock and catering to the college radio crowd, starting with the inaugural winner, Owen Pallett (a.k.a. Final Fantasy). Lately, though, the award for the Canadian album judged to be the year’s best has gone to far-out artists working in a variety of genres.
Let’s call the evolution a rebranding.
Dutcher, an extroverted New Brunswick-born composer and member of the Tobique First Nation, is the first-ever two-time Polaris winner. His victory in 2018 for Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa is emblematic of the prize’s shift in focus. The album, which also earned Dutcher a Juno Award, was a diligent exercise in ethnomusicology – a semi-operatic setting of the dying Indigenous language using century-old wax-cylinder recordings to interpret traditional Wolastoqey songs.
Indie rock it was not.
There is an inherent drama to Jeremy Dutcher’s music that is independent of language. For Motewolonuwok, he recorded original songs for the first time – and partly in English, also new for him.Kirk Lisaj/Supplied
Following up such a signature debut was never going to be simple. “I could’ve made over three other archive albums,” the 33-year-old artist told The Canadian Press in 2023. “But I didn’t want to do that. You get stuck in one story.” So, for Motewolonuwok, Dutcher recorded original songs for the first time – and partly in English, also new for him.
As well, the record’s production is extravagant and the arrangements are lush compared to his relatively lo-fi debut. Oh, and by the way, Polaris Prize pioneer Pallett co-produced the album and arranged the strings.
Let’s not call Dutcher’s evolution a rebranding, but a bold reinvention. The one-album wonder had done it again.
The piano-based Motewolonuwok is an earnest, aspirational statement of stately soul and lightly jazzed balladry that often confronts the fraught relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. The song Pomawsuwinuwok Wonakiyawolotuwok translates to “people are rising.” Another, The Land That Held Them, addresses the murders of Indigenous women. The album’s centrepiece, Ancestors Too Young, is a pleading response to the youth suicide crisis.
The faces I see, they look like she
I need to leave so I can breathe
Tears are a language I speak well
Better than my own alone without her
The record’s production is extravagant and the arrangements are lush compared to Dutcher's relatively lo-fi debut.Kirk Lisaj/Supplied
There is an inherent drama to Dutcher’s music that is independent of language. His tenor voice is tremulous and insistent – Hozier is bubble gum in comparison. This isn’t music made in high dudgeon. Every song feels like an invitation, whether titled Take My Hand or not.
Where his second album and Polaris Prize take Dutcher is hard to say. International, probably. In the mean time, he plays the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston, on Friday, and the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium in Halifax, Oct. 25 and 26. In between those gigs he shares a bill with the legendary Abenaki filmmaker and musician Alanis Obomsawin at the Vancouver International Film Festival, on Oct. 4.
In his short acceptance speech on Tuesday, Dutcher spoke about his Polaris past: “Six years ago, I put out my first record, and this award changed my life.” Indeed, he was catapulted onto the national stage, upon which he addressed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about reconciliation at the 2019 Juno Awards.
If Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa changed Dutcher’s life, Motewolonuwok is meant to change hearts and minds. “We’re here to shine for you,” he said of his fellow musicians. “Now go shine for other people.”