‘Sweet ride’ to the Junos

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This article was published 29/03/2025 (573 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Eight Manitoba artist are vying for hardware at this year’s Juno Awards. Sebastian Gaskin and Liam Duncan reflect on their respective journeys to Canada’s biggest annual music award show.

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When his latest album, Lovechild, was released in February, Gaskin’s name and likeness got the Yonge-Dundas Square treatment, beaming out from a digital billboard for all of downtown Toronto to see.

Scaling the side of the city’s Eaton Centre shopping mall, the Spotify endorsement was literally enormous. But for the 29-year-old singer, the recognition wasn’t nearly as impactful as a much smaller piece of outdoor advertising unveiled last summer on the road into Tataskweyak Cree Nation.

“I’ll never forget that day,” says Gaskin, who is nominated for Contemporary Indigenous Artist of the Year at Sunday’s Juno Awards in Vancouver.

In July, Gaskin, who has lived in Toronto since 2022, returned to Tataskweyak, formerly known as Split Lake, to speak with his community’s youth about his upbringing, his love for his home and his musical career, which has taken off since signing with both Universal Music Canada and the Indigenous label Ishkodé Records.

The homecoming was already special: he had received a star blanket and a “key to the rez” — a beaded medallion of the Tataskweyak flag. Gaskin thought the welcome was warm enough.

“But they said, ‘Hey, we’ve got one more thing to show you,’” laughs Gaskin, whose first performances on stage came as a child during the Split Lake Treaty Days talent show, urged by his mother to sing a rendition of the country standard Evangeline.

While Gaskin was spending the day soaking up the company of relatives and friends, a crew of volunteers slipped out to put up a bright new roadside sign on the way into town, showing Gaskin belting out a tune.

“Tataskweyak Cree Nation, Home of Sebastian Gaskin,” the sign reads.

“I was speechless. Even to this day, it’s such an incredible feeling to be so warmly embraced by the community that brought you up,” says Gaskin, who has since returned for another youth conference in Tataskweyak, a community of 2,500 located northeast of Thompson.

Gaskin’s Juno nomination comes on the strength of his song Brown Man, a tune he came up with in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

Sickened by what he saw on TV and the internet, Gaskin says he closed himself off from technology to find answers.

“It got me thinking about my place in the world as an Indigenous man, in particular as a large, masculine-presenting person of colour, and how it can be dangerous to exist as that. I wanted to spark a conversation about that and for it to be recognized on a national level,” he says.

On Sunday, Gaskin will be joined at the Juno gala by his mother, with the singer planning to wear a sport coat freshly embroidered with silvery floral designs. Also nominated in the contemporary Indigenous artist category are Adrian Sutherland, Tia Wood, Snotty Nose Rez Kids and Celeigh Cardinal.

Ghost, another Gaskin track from Lovechild, is included in Hill Kourkoutis’s nomination package for Engineer of the Year.

Gaskin hopes for a strong showing, but won’t be too disappointed to be a runner-up, given that he’s repping his home community.

“You can’t forget where you come from,” he says.

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Liam Duncan is flying to Vancouver for the Junos, but for the bandleader of Winnipeg-based Boy Golden, most of the journey to national recognition came behind the wheel of his beloved 1995 Toyota Previa.

After wearing out a series of used Dodge Grand Caravans and before adopting the flipped legislative moniker, Duncan’s grandfather’s neighbour pulled up in the weirdest van the teenager had ever seen.

“I said, ‘George, that’s a sweet ride,’” says Duncan, now 29, who offered a reasonable price.

“He said, ‘How about $1,000 and I’ll safety it for you, too.”

Duncan, who with Dylan Macdonald (Field Guide) and Roman Clarke formed the 2010s indie rock trio the Middle Coast, had yet to embark on his solo career, but inside the Previa, the leader of the Church of Better Daze band learned how to stand out.

“It became a core of my personality, and it was a very identifiable vehicle, conspicuous. My friends would see it around town and know which coffee shops I’d been at. I took it on tour when I made my first album under my own name. I took it on tour to Toronto and Vancouver, and somewhere in there I moved to Toronto in that van, packing whatever I could,” he says.

In 2021, shortly after finishing the recording of the album For Eden, for which Duncan is now nominated for contemporary roots album of the year, the van took its last drive, just short of Duncan’s goal of 500,000 kilometres.

On the strength of their debut album Church of Better Daze, Boy Golden was opening for the Sheepdogs on a Canada-U.S. tour.

“The Previa wasn’t going to handle that,” he recalls, likening the aging van to a lawnmower with a radio.

On a snowy highway ahead of the tour, Duncan, who never drove faster than 95 in his ’95, moved out to pass a semi-trailer before hitting a snow drift and subsequently a truck. Duncan was driving back to Brandon to deliver a bed frame to his family.

“I was pretty much fine, had some staples in my head, and maybe was slightly concussed, but I was so lucky,” he recalls.

“That was the end of the Previa.”

The van never registered another click. But when Duncan released For Eden last July, he selected as a cover image a glamour shot of himself leaning against a Previa, licence plate BOY GLDN.

Now, Duncan drives a Ford Transit van, saying the most important thing is keeping his friends safe.

But in the CD player, the Previa and the before times live on.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com