One broken leg and an earthquake later, Lucette brings gorgeous EP to Double Dragon Thursday

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De-jetlagging and just back from Japan, Edmonton indie-pop musician Lucette was in Bangkok when a 7.7-magnitude earthquake ripped a 400-km gash in the earth on March 28, killing over 5,000 people across Myanmar and Thailand.

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Though not outwardly injured, she notes, “I don’t know if this is normal, but I’ve been having these dizzy spells since the earthquake.

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“I feel kind of shaken around a bit, but last night,” she noted Tuesday, “was the first time I had more than six hours’ sleep.”

The recent geological shakeup followed a devastating accident where she broke her tipsis ankle skateboarding, a metal rod going through her tibia three surgeries later, with maybe another dive into the operating room impending.

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“I actually was supposed to make a record,” she explains, “and then that happened. And then the producer that I was supposed to work with dropped out …

“So it was just kind of like all this s*** happening all at once, and that was in 2021, so still kind of post-pandemic, too,” she says, needing zero explanation there.

With this backdrop of emerging from the cosmic dryer cycle, you can see why the artist — real name Lauren Gillis — is raring to go and very much looking forward to finally launching her lovely and vulnerable new EP Nice Girl from the Suburbs at Double Dragon Thursday. Local songbird Caylie G opens the show.

The music of Lucette (the project named after her grandmother) is the sort of lush and bittersweet stuff that makes you pause talking and deploy your Shazam at the café.

From the new EP’s whisper-seductive opening track Too Soon for Sorry and certainly into the oddly invigorating gloom-scroll of Heading for the End where she sings, “only I know how to let me down,” Lucette’s writing and voice plus that reverb-layered production are gorgeous together.

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With her powerful AM-dashboard-pop sensibility and affection for collaboration which includes her lauded, 2019 album Deluxe Room Hotel produced by neo-outlaw country’s Sturgill Simpson, plus notable collabs with Edmonton country genius Mariel Buckley, 33-year-old Gillis was over in Thailand making further connections at a professional musicians camp, creative people eagerly engaged in being more than the sum of their parts.

“Basically,” she explains, “they brought me in as a writer, to write for artists from a label from Toronto. So it was Canadians, some Americans, and then folks from Japan and South Korea.

“That’s kind of my side gig now,” she says happily, “just working as a songwriter. I just love making music, so it’s really fun to write music that you could never pull off.

“I could never pull off a K-pop song, but it’s really fun to write.”

After Thailand, she hopped northeast over the South and East China Seas, where her partner was drumming for Billy Zizi on tour in Japan.

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“It was kind of like, ‘Hey, do you guys like mind if I just come hang for a couple weeks because I’m already halfway across the world?’ ”

She hooked up with a couple of Japanese writers she met at the camp, and they ended up writing a song together.

“What a lot of people do there is write for commercial radio. To be frank, there’s not as much money in what I do as K-pop, right?” she laughs.

“For a songwriter or producer, it’s a little more beneficial to write for something where you could potentially have a radio hit. I mean, who knows? I’m not ruling that out for myself — it would be nice if that happened.

“But it’s a very different way of pursuing music.”

Gillis fell for Japan, as is customary for anyone who visits, which by the way, in more Edmonton news includes local gitterball punks Bad Buddy currently on tour.

Gillis explores some of Japan’s great tendencies. “I am not a really reserved person,” she notes, “but I really love how their culture is so circled respect. It’s like the greater whole versus the individual, even just getting on and off trains.

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“I just found as soon as you were out of especially Tokyo, it was so quiet everywhere you went. It’s different, obviously, if you’re at an izakaya where people are drinking, but every time we went for ramen, people are so focused on their food, so respectful of everyone’s experience.

“I think a big thing, too, was with everything, the focus on quality. Even getting gas station food or convenience store food, it’s always fresh.

“It was easily one of my favourite countries I’ve ever been to, if not my favourite.”

Listening to Lucette’s music, you can feel her appreciation for production — there’s a sense of hard work and perfection to get the songs perfectly so.

But she’s also clearly, lyrically reached a new point of surrender — especially after hitting those walls.

“I already had mental health issues to begin with,” she says. “And then I was forced to really sit with everything. And admittedly, when I was writing this, it’s like, I think I know that I do things to myself that don’t help me get out of these depression holes.

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“And I just wanted to write about that, because I didn’t feel like a victim in any way. If anything, I was like, ‘I’m not helping myself in this situation to make myself feel better.’ ”

One of the EP’s standouts is the simple and vulnerable Rodeo Clown, where you can feel the weight of performance any musician, social media user or, really, person looking for love feels.

“I don’t think I’ve ever really been this sort of specific, as far as being a little more autobiographical with my songs,” says Gillis. “I definitely wrote about loneliness and, you know, feeling down before.

“But I feel like this is one step further. And so the cool thing is, I think because I’ve matured as a person, I don’t really attach an outcome to what happens with releasing music, and just kind of ride in the waves.”

Reaction has been great, however — her show at Ritchie Hall last year packed — and these connection, which we’ll witness more of Thursday, cathartic.

Lucette is also heading to North Country Fair solstice festival in late June for the first time, joining an already impressive lineup including Skinny Dyck, Wyatt C. Lewis and Appalachian death folk band Bridge City Sinners.

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“Even just people messaging me and being like, ‘This means a lot.’ As an artist, that’s all you can hope for is people to latch on to that catharsis.

“And you know,” she laughs, “I’m not trying to therapize anybody.

“It’s more just kind of like, ‘Hey, we’re all in this shitstorm of a situation together.”

PREVIEW

Lucette w/ Caylie G

Where Double Dragon (10524 Jasper Ave.)

When 10 p.m. Thursday, April 24

Tickets $32.53 all in at eventbrite.ca

fgriwkowsky@postmedia.com

@fisheyefoto.bsky.social

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