Out singer-songwriter Ashley MacIsaac is taking Celtic music to the club with FDLER, his collaborative new album with producer and DJ Jay “Sticks” Andrews. MacIsaac has won three JUNO Awards for his albums that fused Celtic influences with folk and rock music, and he said he was looking to stretch his sounds into the realm of dance music, which prompted him to seek out a DJ.
“I was looking for a DJ that could make something fairly modern,” MacIsaac said. “I did a quick simple search on the Internet for a DJ, and I was living in Windsor [Ontario] at the time, and this guy popped up and I thought he was from Detroit. When I tracked him down, I found out he was Nova Scotian. It turned out he came from a background of playing Celtic music with pipe bands. I knew it was meant to be. I hate to say this but when I first saw the video of him I thought, Wow! That guy is hot. I just knew he’d look great on stage. He’s got that young basketball-player look. He was making pretty broad statements about the kind of music that he likes and I was wide open to whatever we could come up with. Obviously my audience, a lot of them are older, so I didn’t want to get too experimental or crazy. I wanted it to be accessible to the people that are listening to dance music. It’s broad enough where the Celtic audience won’t be too thrown off by it.”
MacIsaac said the creative process for this EDM-influenced album was similar to his Celtic folk/rock albums, but he usually gets the best song ideas off the cuff.
“I approached it with picking the right beats first and the right track ideas and styles but then, as with any project I’ve ever done, I spent time in the studio. After three days of trying something that is not working, in three minutes all of a sudden a track comes out that is completely unique to the moment,” he said. “So you never know. In three minutes what you can come up with is often better than what you spent three months trying to figure out.”
Even though MacIsaac is focused on dance music at the moment, he’s also making plans to take fiddle talents into another genre with his next project.
“Believe it or not, I want to make a country record,” he said. “I’ve been a fiddle player all my life so it makes sense to make something in that genre. I like country music so that is something I am working toward and working with other people on. I assume that any listener to any product that I ever make will realize that through the entire thing there is one guiding principle, and that is for me to be able do what I can do best. The style that I package myself in, if it’s a country record or a rock record or a dance record, I just try to give my best.”
When asked about the atmosphere for out artists in Canada, MacIsaac said that, while the industry is largely accepting, that wasn’t always the case.
“When I started out 20 years ago, Canada wasn’t much different than America,” he said. “Arguably, there was probably more acceptance in the states and that’s probably where I learned to accept myself and say ‘take me or leave me.’ That’s a very American trait. Canada has what we call the tall poppy syndrome. If anybody stands out for something unique, we like to cut them down because we are often quite mediocre. But in the last 15 years, a lot of Canadian artists have become famous all around the world. We are as good as any other people on the planet. I’m proud to be gay and America has allowed me to be that way.”
“FDLER” is out now. Fore more information, visit www.ashleymacisaac.com.