enRoute Inuktitut covers 10 classic pop and rock songs, including “Heart of Glass” by Blondie and “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. Was it easy to choose the songs that made it onto the album?

Elisapie Isaac Joe Grass, my producer for this album and Ballad of a Runaway Girl, saw quickly that this was a very emotional and personal album for me – sometimes so personal that I didn’t even want to share. I felt like I was cheating my family and my people in the North by revealing these emotions and stories. But sometimes that’s what we have to do: We have to tell the truth.

I’d see him every three to four song choices and we’d try them with voice and guitar. If it felt like we were forcing too much, we knew right away. With “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones, “The Unforgiven” by Metallica, we could tell there was something there.

Joe would often tell me to have a second listen on my jogs. It’s good to choose songs when you’re jogging, because your heart rate is up, you’re warm and you’re alone in your thoughts. There’s something about it that’s emotional. Sometimes I’d cry, and when I’d get home, my boyfriend would know I’d found a song. He was the witness to my heart opening all these locked closets to memories, emotions and traumas.

So, that’s how we connected everything: through the songs that were able to tell a personal story. If they did not, I wasn’t able to do a good job reinterpreting them.

ER You’ve said the album tells the story of your community. What do you mean by that?

EI This album is kind of a reflection of the soundtrack of the North. Even though it mainly covers white people’s music, that’s what we were listening to on the radio through the trauma, chaos and joy. Our way of life was changing quickly. Our grandparents were feeling hopelessness and powerlessness as dog sleds were taken away and dogs were killed while being told their kids would need to learn to be doctors and lawyers to live in the “new world.”

I’m speaking in a harsh way, and I don’t want to talk like a victim, because we are not victims. We are very strong, but it just became so overwhelming. In that context, artists like Led Zeppelin and Cyndi Lauper came to us as friends and let us feel like we could let go for four or five minutes inside a song. That’s how I started to see these songs, how precious and how good they were to us.

ER What was it like to translate each of these songs into Inuktitut?

EI “Wish You Were Here” was special, because some of the lyrics read like they were written by someone tripping out: “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year.” The meaning is complicated, so finding the right words felt equally meaningful. It’s strange, because it was harder for me to translate “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. Even though the lyrics for “Wish You Were Here” are so much more complicated, I had listened to the song so many times, I probably already processed them. When a song is close to you and you decide on its meaning, it helps with translation. It’s not just a technical exercise. Also, when a song is well made—and I think all the songs on the album are—you can understand how it flows.

ER What was the hardest song to translate?

EI It wasn’t hard, but “Going to California” by Led Zeppelin stands out because it gets a little psychedelic. But that also works in a sense: The desert feel is almost like being lost in the tundra and flipping out over nature.

ER Have you been able to perform the album in Nunavik?

EI I haven’t yet, but I would love to play there. I experimented a little last year before the album came out with a secret show in Kuujjuaq. Seeing people of all ages run to the dance floor as I sang “Uummati Attanarsimat (Heart of Glass),” singing and dancing like it was an Inuit song, was the most beautiful thing.

When my biological mother, who’s in her mid-70s now, heard “Isumagijunnaitaungituq (The Unforgiven)” for the first time, she listened so attentively. Later on, she said if she had not known otherwise, she would have thought I wrote the song for my stepfather, her husband who had recently passed away, an Inuk leader and great hunter. I thought that was pretty cool.