Charlotte Cardin on the creative process behind her first full album ‘Phoenix’

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This article was published 15/07/2021 (1894 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Being a top model isn’t for everyone.

Charlotte Cardin knows this from experience: a one-time member of Elite Model Management Paris, whose photos have been featured in Elle, Vogue, Nylon and Interview magazines, the Montreal native never warmed to the world of fashion and catwalks.

“Modelling was unhealthy,” Cardin, 26, recently said in an interview from her home.

“It never made me feel like I belonged … never made me feel that I was good enough … never made me feel like I had any sort of value that went beyond my physical appearance, which is the most damaging thing one can go through.”

She did it for five years, from the ages of 15 to 20, so she could pursue her true passion: music, and the path that recently led to the release of her first full album, “Phoenix,” one that recently landed her on the Polaris Music Prize long list for album of the year contention.

“As soon as music allowed me to make a living and I didn’t need another source of income to get by, I stopped modelling immediately because for me it was always a means to an end,” Cardin explains. “It was never something I wanted to pursue for a long time.

“I didn’t like it at all, but I guess it did help me adjust to being in front of the camera and maybe even performing.

“When you’re an artist, you have to do interviews and you have to be on TV sometimes, and you do these things that can be really uncomfortable if you’re not used to it because they’re not linked to music at all.”

When Cardin began transitioning to music nine years ago, she auditioned for the Quebec equivalent of “The Voice” — called “La Voix” — and narrowly avoided another pitfall as all entrants were required to sign a contract before they auditioned (a common practice of the majority of TV reality talent competitions).

“I was very lucky because I got the exposure from the show and I didn’t win, which was an absolute blessing, because I didn’t get the crazy, aggressive contract which basically ruins the lives of the artists that end up winning.

“When I think about that possibility, I get anxiety because my career would have been a nightmare if that had happened.”

The benefit that Cardin did extract from “La Voix” was a fan base and the freedom to follow her artistic heart. She played bars and released her six-song album “Big Boy” with songs in both French and English, following it up in 2017 with the eight-song “Main Girl,” earning her a couple of 2018 Juno Award nominations for Songwriter and Breakthrough Artist of the Year.

When she began writing the material that was to become “Phoenix” something didn’t feel right.

“I started ‘Phoenix’ the same way I usually did it: me at home for the first few months writing the album, just trying to isolate myself,” Cardin said. “And I hit a bit of a wall. I felt like I was very limited and I wasn’t sure which styles I wanted to explore or what I wanted to talk about.”

So she decided to expand her horizons and began writing with Jason Brando, her best friend, producer, manager and owner of her record label, Cult Nation.

“Jason said, ‘OK, let’s do a few sessions together.’ I knew Jason was a really good songwriter, he had produced everything that I had released, but we had never fully written a song together.

“He knows me so well that it just clicked from the very beginning and I thought, ‘Wow, it’s just lovely to be able to share this process with someone.’”

Now galvanized by the extra support, the duo, with a few other helping hands, constructed a resilient album in “Phoenix”: 13 songs that are a beguiling mix of sexy trip-hop laced electronics (“XOXO,” “Sex to Me,” “Phoenix,” “Sad Girl,” “Romeo”); a touch of disco (“Passive Aggressive,” “Meaningless,”) and ballads (“Anyone,” “Good Girl” and “Sun Goes Down.”)

The team experience empowered Cardin to search more deeply within herself, transforming “Phoenix” into a symbolic interpretation of a woman rising from her own emotional ashes.

“The creative process behind the whole album was about me digging into wounds and bruises that I had that I really had to confront,” she explains. “Whenever you feel that personal growth that really comes from painful and sad moments, and shameful moments and self-doubt, for me it’s that duality between self-growth and sacrifice. That’s what the album’s about and that’s why the phoenix for me was such a strong symbol.”

Cardin says there’s a dichotomy in her music as she tries to balance the private with the public — and that “Sun Goes Down,” a lovely sounding guitar-infused ballad, was one of the most difficult songs she’s ever written.

“It’s one of the most personal, a song about one of my best friends who went through a really, really dark moment a few years ago to the point that I thought I might lose him,” she says.

“He was dealing with all kinds of addiction, mental health problems and all these really, really hard things to go through. That was a really hard song for me to write, especially being so worried about him at the same time.”

But the bottom line is that she writes for — and answers to — herself.

“I think that’s the one thing that I want people to know, that this album was made for me. That’s something I will probably struggle with my whole life because I grew up sometimes not being sure of what I was doing for other people and what I was doing for myself.

“I write for myself because I need to process the things that I don’t know how to communicate in a way other than music,” she continues. “Sometimes I dress them up, romanticize them or make them a little bit more intense so that the storytelling is more fun.”

Upon its release in May, after being delayed for a year due to the pandemic, “Phoenix” topped Canadian retail and streaming charts for two weeks, and Cardin says she’s grateful for the validation.

“It’s made me want to work twice as hard and makes me even hungrier for the next steps. I want to get back on the road, make new fans, meet new people and keep the creative juices flowing.”

Nick Krewen is a Toronto-based freelance contributor for the Star. Reach him via email: octopus@rogers.com