How Elisapie gave new meaning to 10 pop and rock classics by translating them into Inuktitut

Q23:37Elisapie: How translating pop songs to Inuktitut helped her heal

Is there a song in your life that immediately conjures up memories? For the artist Elisapie, there are 10 of these songs and she's included them all on her new album, Inuktitut.

On the surface, Inuktitut is a covers album of notable pop and rock classics, like Dreams by Fleetwood Mac and Blondie's Heart of Glass, but each of these songs represent a special memory from Elisapie's childhood. What makes the album unique is that she also translated each song to Inuktitut, the Inuit language she heard a lot growing up in Salluit, Que.

While the project was something the Inuk singer-songwriter had wanted to do for years, making it proved to be a slow and somewhat challenging process because she had to translate all the songs and get the music rights.

"When you change [a song] to another language, it becomes a whole complicated thing with the publishers and everything, but we managed to get Robert Plant," Elisapie excitedly tells Q's Tom Power in an interview (Led Zeppelin is notorious for rarely licensing their music).

"We gave ourselves a whole year [after we recorded the album] just to make sure we have everybody, because it's a bit complicated. Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Debbie Harry, Metallica, right away, they were like, 'Yes. Cool.' But I think Robert and [Jimmy Page] are a little bit harder to reach."

The record's fifth track, Qaisimalaurittuq, is a rendition of Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd.

At first, Elisapie didn't want to cover the song because "everyone's listened to this song in their young life," which she felt was too easy, but she changed her mind while contemplating it on a jog a few days later.

"I realized, [for me] this song was really about young kids trying to deal with the loss of a cousin who committed suicide, so this was a song we put on often," she recalls. "I started feeling those emotions again and I felt like they've been stuck in my body for so long I didn't even know they were still there."

Elisapie says translating particularly meaningful lyrics, like "We're just two lost souls / Swimming in a fish bowl / Year after year," added another emotional layer to the song.

"When you really try to find the meaning of that in Inuktitut, you realize these really did make sense for us, you know? I'm hoping that my cousins when they'll hear it because English is not our first language, right? so I'm hoping they're going to listen to that and be like, 'Oh, that's why I love this song so much.'"

The full interview with Elisapieis available onour podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview withElisapieproduced by Glory Omotayo.