Later this week Toronto singer Poesy embarks on the biggest tour of her career, and it all starts on Vancouver Island.
Last year Poesy appeared on the CTV reality show The Launch, in which nascent singers from across Canada audition before music industry experts for a chance to record a single.
Poesy’s single, Soldier of Love, debuted at the top of the iTunes All Genres chart and she has since signed a major label record deal and starting this week joins Vancouver’s Matthew Good on a Western Canadian tour. On Feb. 7 Poesy plays in front of a sold-out Port Theatre.
“I’ve never played 20 shows in 28 days before,” Poesy said. “So it’s been a lot of mental prep and just finding ways to keep focused that whole time and also just getting really excited to travel and see a bunch of cities that I’ve never seen before.”
Poesy said her experience with The Launch was a “whirlwind” of events. As someone who was used to releasing music and booking shows on her own, she said it’s been interesting to see how the industry works on a larger scale.
“At first I think it was a little bit overwhelming because like a month before that I was working at the YMCA and playing shows on the weekend and stuff and then I was in a room with like, ‘This guy mixed the Green Day album,'” she said. “So that was weird, but then I think after I kind of came to terms with it, it was just really exciting.”
Poesy said when she first got into songwriting, she did it for herself as a therapeutic tool of self expression. She said now she’s becoming more aware of how her art can help her listeners as well.
“Working with all these professionals and doing this as a job, it kind of made me realize that it’s not just about us, it’s about making stuff that other people can use to feel through their own experiences…” she said. “I think that’s the whole point of doing this.”
This month Poesy finished the tracks for her debut record, which she said is due in the first half of 2019.
“The theme that’s present in all the songs on the record is like, ‘This is who I am, I don’t care if it’s a little bit unconventional, just listen to me say what I have to say,’ which I think is a very ‘first record’ kind of theme,” she said.
In the fall Poesy released the album’s first single, Strange Little Girl, a song that she said announces: “I know who I am and I know what I want to be.”
“I want people who listen to my music to feel that way,” Poesy said. “And I want them to leave a show and feel like all the things that they maybe don’t like about themselves, or maybe that make them different than other people, could actually be really great things.”
WHAT’S ON … Poesy opens for Matthew Good at the Port Theatre on Feb. 7 at 7:30 p.m.
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