Peguis star shooting for interstellar acclaim By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:53 PM CDT Friday, Oct. 17, 2025

The songs started small, but when it came time to record his fifth full-length album, William Prince wanted each track to reach beyond his universe in every direction — onward, outward, backward and upward.

“I’ve written all these songs alone at a table with an acoustic guitar, planning to strap a rocket to them,” the 39-year-old star from Peguis First Nation says. With Further From the Country, which came out Friday via Six Shooter Records, Prince wanted to test his own atmospheric limits.

In discussing the latest collection, the two-time Juno-winning artist can’t help but speak in astronautical terms.

“We’ve put out a number of records now, toured the world. You could say that we’ve done a lot, but when I think of the space from this point to where a lot of the people I look up to these days, like Jason Isbell, Tyler Childers, Brandi Carlisle, Chris Stapleton, Billy Strings, Margo Price, Sierra Farrell — this collection of Americana singers I really admire — from where I am to where they are is a whole other galaxy away,” he says.

After his debut 2017 record, Earthly Days, became a surprise Juno winner, Prince says each subsequent release — Reliever, Gospel First Nation and 2023’s Stand in the Joy — helped put him in rooms he’d never dreamed of gaining admission to. He’s played the Grand Ole Opry, dueted with Willie Nelson and can say hello to Emmylou Harris with the confidence she’ll remember him from last time.

The past few years have functioned as a “journey of validation” for Prince, not only as a Canadian songwriter but as a First Nations artist.

“We’re always trying to work at 150 per cent to be taken just as seriously, and it’s in those moments I can take a breath and really feel seen and heard, that I’m not some asterisk performer on the sheet. I’m there because word’s getting around that I do a good job and write quality songs. It feels great when your peers nod their caps toward you, and there’s safety and acceptance in feeling seen and heard. That’s there for me now,” he says.

Unlike his first anonymous Canadian tour dates in 2016, Prince spent the past several years playing as an increasingly known entity with a golden voice. Riding the high of radio hits (The Spark, Wasted, When You Miss Someone), Prince has typically made his greatest impact on direct, intimate tracks that invite quiet introspection, but the singer says his vision of “country” is more global in scope.

Prince’s newest album isn’t provincial — it’s interstellar.

Never is that clearer than on Further From the Country’s title track, a six-minute odyssey that begins with a more propulsive, rocking sound than Prince has ever employed, before crossing the border down a highway laid through fields of bluegrass. Reaching a rollicking, steely, fiddle-strong conclusion, the opening track could — should? — be the theme to a Canadian James Bond.

That track, and the album it introduces, is Prince showing his full hand, teasing a flush of ambition that’s taken years for the artist to feel ready to share, calling to mind the wide-ranging songcraft of Sturgill Simpson, especially on cosmic barn-dance tracks, such as Flowers on the Dash.

“I love songs that sound like this one,” Prince says of the opener. “They live in me just as much as the gentle Gordon Lightfoot stuff. For a lot of years, I was focused on thinking, ‘This is my voice. These are my words. Please take me seriously as a writer.’ And I think we’ve now arrived at the place where it’s more about fun and experimentation.

“With these songs now living outside, we’ve been bold to put them out into the world, out into the atmosphere, see how much further down the road they’ll take us,” says Prince, who brought in labelmate Liam Duncan of Boy Golden to produce the album, recorded across three sessions at Winnipeg’s No Fun Club. Prince’s wife, Alyshia Grace, provides backing vocals.

While he loves playing small, Prince says he aspires to know how it feels “to move a whole stadium,” such as Charlie Crockett or his friends in the Lumineers or the War & Treaty, who brought Prince on tour as their opening act in 2023. (In August, Prince and Grace shared their first dance as a married couple to that band’s track That’s How Love is Made).

“It’s no small feat to do that, and that’s where I imagine we’re going. I’m trying to equip our ship with all the tools we’re going to need. You want to go open for Stapleton for a month? You better know how to bring a show that is of equal calibre to that,” he says.

“That’s what I’m always in pursuit of — keeping up with my heroes in that sense — but at the same time being unafraid to be my authentic self.”

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca