Indie… and loving it

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This article was published 13/05/2025 (484 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Claire Morrison describes her first full-length solo album, she speaks first in the language of industry: campaign strategies, release schedules, media attention.

She comes by it honestly.

“I started as a professional musician in 2010 and around that time also got my first job working with an artist management firm,” says Morrison, 33, who also has experience in event production and artist administration. “All of that has really helped me become more confident as an independent artist. I have the skills to get this thing out into the world.”

The thing in question is Where Do You Go at Night?, an 11-track album that contains stories and revelations from the Winnipeg-born folk singer’s first decade of adulthood.

“It feels like this big tome,” she says. “You live through so many things in your 20s… for better, and certainly for worse as well, they’re such rich years.”

For Morrison, who grew up in St. Boniface, her late 20s were punctuated by musical burnout.

Having spent years performing and working in the industry, she hit pause to pursue a degree in philosophy and religious studies with a minor in Arabic language at McGill University.

It was a much-needed detour and confirmation that music was the right path forward.

Morrison still lives in Montreal, but returns to the Prairies regularly to work on Fire & Smoke — a long-running, intermittent collaboration with Winnipeg musician Daniel Péloquin-Hopfner. The group rekindled in 2021 after a years-long hiatus and put out a new EP, Constance, last spring.

Her own project, released last month, has followed a similar timeline.

“It’s been a busy couple of years,” she says.

Where Do You Go at Night? — her first solo release since a 2013 EP — also includes a strong Winnipeg connection by way of producer Rayannah.

“I had implicit trust in her from the beginning,” Morrison says. “I could’ve gone with someone (in Montreal), but we had such a clear musical and creative and esthetic understanding of what we wanted to do.”

Morrison and Rayannah — an experimental Franco-Manitobaine synthpop artist — first met as kids at a summer music camp and have supported each other’s careers as adults in various ways, including touring through Canada and Europe together.

When she returned to music full-time, Morrison knew exactly with whom to entrust her debut album.

“Rayannah is just as insistent and detail-oriented as me. It’s kind of dangerous when we work together because we’ll follow the buried treasure down to the bottom of the ocean,” she says. “It’s not right till it’s right.”

While she often performs in French with Fire & Smoke, it felt natural to record Where Do You Go at Night? in English. (Morrison, whose parents both worked as translators, is multilingual and has studied Spanish as well as the aforementioned Arabic.)

One of her favourite moments on the album is the closing track, You Are Light — an evolving song that Morrison had previously recorded and performed for years. The latest iteration includes her silky vocals laid bare over Rayannah playing synths to haunting effect. The live take that ended up on the record made both artists burst into tears in the studio.

“It’s a song of hope that I wrote to myself,” Morrison says. “To see the voyage that this song has taken from when it was first written to now sort of encapsulates what I’m trying to with this record and how it spans this era of my life.”

The album’s title is leading question asking listeners where they go when left alone with their thoughts — a proposition that can be both scary and healing. For Morrison, the tracklist contains both sensuality and rage, two classic coming-of-age characteristics.

“It’s all about these things that go bump in the night … all these things that, historically, are considered unbecoming when they come from women,” she says.

Where Do You Go at Night? is available on all major streaming platforms. Visit clairemorrison.com for more information.

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com