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Music

Ria Mae is Climbing Up Canada's Golden Ladder of Pop

The Halifax artist explains her seemingly quick rise from nobody to national attention.

All photos by Lane Dorsey

Somewhere in the Bible, there’s a line that goes “truly, no prophet is accepted in their hometown.” And maybe it’s a bit amiss to try and make parallels between old religious texts and Canadian singer-songwriters but that’s what’s happening here. For Ria McNutt —known to a quickly-growing audience as the more star-apropos name, Ria Mae — the prophet-outcast archetype resounds. And though she may not be a household name, her hooky anthems have likely already gotten stuck in your head. 2014 single, “Clothes Off” has already been a golden ticket for Mae, thrusting her into a new stage of her career and in competition with Canada’s top pop lords like Drake, The Weeknd, and Justin Bieber with a 2016 JUNO Single of the Year nomination— seemingly, out of nowhere.

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The folk singer-turned-pop artist’s relatively quick climb up the Canadian ladder may feel like overnight success but her beginnings are chock-full of rejection, isolation and all the other rites of passage that make a singer-songwriter worth listening to. “I always felt like I was the odd one out in the Halifax scene,” the JUNO nominee says. “Which was kind of a blessing, because I had to seek other people and kind of leave Halifax to find musicians who were like-minded.”

She first started writing songs at the age of nine, before recording music seriously as a teenager. Her love for music would eventually push her to play folky gigs around Halifax while trying to sell her debut 2010 EP Behind the Bad to little fanfare. All the while, working odd jobs to support her career. According to Mae, it was the pipe dream of being another small-town artist who grinded it out hard enough to break through to the mainstream that kept her afloat. “I certainly wasn’t doing [music] full-time, but I was trying my friggin’ best—I’ve always been pretty delusional. My first EP, I think I printed 500 copies and I think I still have 300 of them.”

Eventually, a helping hand would come in the form of Luke Boyd, better known as Halifax based-rapper Classified. Mae—who’d met Boyd in the early-2000s at a Halifax skatepark when she was just a fan—reached out to his agent a couple years later in hopes of a potential collaboration. “When I was younger, some of his people were passing out a four-song EP of his, and I grabbed it and took it home to listen to. I really liked it, but years later when he and David Myles starting putting songs out, that’s when I really wanted to work with him.”

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Boyd would agree to work with Mae one song at a time, until Mae reeled him in—not only as a producer, but as a mentor. “Nobody wanted to work with me in Halifax, so then [in 2014], I took a year off and just worked with him. We work really well together so it just made sense.” As she spent more time in the studio, her interest in purely guitar-driven music waned and she started incorporating electronic sounds into her writing. “‘Clothes Off’ was one of many demos I made in Montreal in 2013, and one of the first that Class[ified] gravitated to and the one [that felt right].” Still unsigned and living in Halifax, “Clothes Off”, began to get some traction on the airwaves, specifically one local radio station—CKUL-FM Radio 96.5FM. As luck would have it, a Sony A&R heard the song on that very station and put out a call out to her. According to Mae, it was as if everything before was a folky experiment incubator to build the confidence to do what she’s always wanted—pop music.

“I always listen to what people say about pop — people always say it’s so easy to kind of sell out, but [pop’s] always been my passion. So, I don’t feel like I sold out — I feel like I got closer to what I listen to.” With an affinity for The Beatles, Sam Cooke and Tracy Chapman, and a current fixation with Zayn Malik and Rihanna, Mae pulls her influences from all corners of the spectrum. More importantly, it seems to be connecting with audiences. Her “Clothes Off” single has already amassed some two million hits on Youtube, and follow-up track “Gold” is also starting to gain traction.

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“Everyone tells me I’m blowing up and I don’t know — I signed to a major label about a year ago, and so [that] sort of changed things, because, with that came more radio play, more press, and kinda just [started to] reach a wider audience.“ She adds, “I’d just like to contribute to the pop conversation. I really like where radio is going right now —Sam Smith, Adele, Ed Sheeran coming out with these new arrangements that couldn't have existed on radio a few years ago — I just want to keep it going. I want to keep adding to that.”

Regardless of how she's feeling, Mae isn’t taking her foot off the gas anytime soon. She’s currently on tour with Coleman Hell, and she’s preparing to release her first full-length album since signing with Sony. And who knows, maybe she’ll also beat out Bieber and Drake and win a JUNO.

“It’s a pretty stacked category — I think I’m gonna win,” she laughs.

Hillary Windsor is a writer in Halifax. Follow her on Twitter.