Red Rock Indian Band musician to release new single this summer
By Rick Garrick
THUNDER BAY — Red Rock Indian Band musician Sara Kae (Kanutski) plans to hold a single release party on June 1 for her song Rise, which she wrote on National Indigenous Peoples Day 2020.
“I wrote it just because I was thinking about myself as a child and everything I went through and the battles I had being an Indigenous person in a [non-Indigenous] world,” says Kae, who grew up with traditional views and was around pow wows, ceremonies, and sweat lodges when she was young but began feeling embarrassed about her culture as she got older. “When I left Thunder Bay, I realized all the beauty that my culture has and how much I want to hone that and really identify moreso and be proud of who I was, so I kind of ran with that and started to write about that experience and thinking about my sisters.”
Kae says she doesn’t want her sisters to go through the same experiences she went through.
“I just want to see a world where that isn’t a thing, where people don’t have those connotations and those very negative views on Indigenous peoples and that racist point of view,” Kae says. “So it was just coming from this place of wanting to uplift and talk about a life without all of that and praying and hoping that one day that’s going to just be the reality.”
Kae, who graduated from Music Performance and Technology at the Metalworks Institute in Mississauga in 2019 and now works in sales and marketing at the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra, says she had to work on the song with Rocket Fuel Records in Toronto through Zoom meetings and phone calls due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I actually flew down to Toronto to record final vocals at Metalworks (Studios) and I got COVID-19, so I couldn’t, unfortunately, but I just ended up recording them here in Thunder Bay,” Kae says. “So that’s the beauty of a digital and Internet world is that I’m able to work with this team in Toronto while I live in my cozy home in Thunder Bay.”
Kae says she worked with Rob Nickerson at his studio in Thunder Bay to record the song.
“We started tracking the vocals and we did it until we felt, ‘Okay, we like this take,’” Kae says. “I’m trying to get to a place where I’m fully comfortable in the studio and I think I’m just not there yet; however, I always go in there with that: ‘Let’s have fun.’”
Kae says her first influence in music was her father Ron Kanutski.
“I just saw him singing and I kind of naturally just picked it up,” Kae says. “I began to love it and I always wanted to be on stage, and it just kind of grew into its own after that.”
Kae says she began taking singing lessons when she was eight-years-old and began performing songs at gigs her father set up when she was about 12-years-old in communities across northwestern Ontario, including Netmizaaggamig Nishnaabeg, Longlac, Geraldton, and Dryden.
“It was just all the surrounding communities and we would find a way to perform for these kids and talk with them and hang out with them,” Kae says.
Kae says her future goals include working with Indigenous youth, making music, and using music as a tool to connect.
“I want to use music as a resource to go different places and see different places and people,” Kae says. “I do want to be performing and I want to be exploring. I think I’m just here to grow as an artist and as a person.”