'It's more about the work': Debby Friday on how the Polaris Prize changed her life
The Toronto-based musician also opens up about her new album on The Block
When electronic musician Debby Friday took home the Polaris Music Prize in 2023, she took a moment to celebrate weirdness: "I've always been a little bit strange, a little bit different from other people," she said. "And it's only in retrospect that I've been able to see that this has been a superpower all along. This is actually a gift and I just want to say that I think it's very important to protect your strangeness, protect the things that make you different."
Since winning the prize, she's toured around the world and continued to evolve as an artist, and now she's releasing her second album, The Starrr of the Queen of Life.
Friday stopped by The Block's studio for a conversation with Angeline Tetteh-Wayoe about how the win changed her life, and what fans can expect from the new album. You can listen to the full conversation above, and read an excerpt below.
So [you released] Good Luck, your debut album after releasing quite a few EPs ... [when] it was announced that your first album had won the Polaris Music Prize, how [were] you feeling in that moment?
Uh, very overwhelmed and kind of unreal. It actually took a couple of days for it to settle in that I had won the Polaris when it happened. I remember the first night, the first day after I woke up as being like, "Did that happen or was that a dream?"
Super surreal.
Yeah, very surreal.
Yeah, it's kind of nice. Like sometimes that surreal feeling comes when something horrible has happened for you, just like, "Am I in a nightmare?" But it's kind of nice to have a good dream, [a] kind of surreal feeling. Apparently that win changed your focus a little bit with music and made you want to grind harder. [Did music] put [things] into focus? Were you always focused on pursuing this as a profession?
That win kind of illuminated different things for me. I think with every success or milestone, you kind of have these moments as an artist where it really shines a light on whatever is going on in your career that needs correcting or reorientation or something. And when I won Polaris, I just remember, of course I was very happy and very proud of this achievement, because it is an achievement. And at the same time, I had to take a really hard look at my career, my personal life, all of these things that were going on outside of the win and there was definitely some restructuring that happened for sure. But it also made me feel more sure. And I feel I've gained a lot more clarity over the last two years since then. And in turn, that has made me more ambitious, but just in a different kind of way.
Yeah, OK, so how would you compare your ambition post-win to pre-win?
I'd say like pre-win, I was more so focused on the stuff, on the things. Like, "OK, I need to get this award. I need to get this accolade. I need this review and this magazine and that type of stuff." It was really the stuff, [and I was] a little bit more materialist, versus now I feel I'm so much more focused on the spiritual dimension of actually putting out music. So it's like, "Is this true? Is this honest? Is this clear? Is this me expressing myself like fully authentically as possible in the moment?" And it's more about the work. And it's also more about the connection with my fans and the people that support me. I feel so much more grounded in that this time around than I did before, because I've just been paying attention differently.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. To hear the full interview, listen to The Block on CBC Music.
