Shad had been planning on calling this album Fear of Death. After all, they’re the first words the hip-hop artist speaks on his new record and also the title of its closing track. But something about that didn’t feel right. It wasn’t very inviting, for one. It’s also a difficult truth for many people, and Shad wanted to be sensitive to that. So he started thinking about different ways to represent the themes he’d been exploring—the duality of loss and renewal.
“I realized Start Anew means the same thing as what I was reflecting on,” he says, on the line from Toronto. “It’s just the other side of it. As much as I was thinking about endings, what I was really thinking about is how we have to pass through endings to get to something better—and how there’s no way around it, and there’s no shortcut. It just takes courage.”
He experienced a shift in his own thinking, too, in the process of making the album, about his own definition of fear and just how deeply connected courage is to it. “It’s about the courage of facing reality,” he explains, adding, “It takes courage to look at that and takes courage to move through that.”
Reaching such profound realizations has been an evolution for Shad on a personal front, something he came to understand somewhere along the journey of his spiritual practice. On Start Anew, his seventh studio album, they come through lines like “Sometimes it’s hardest to see what’s in front of your face but look” on the straight-shooting “Look Pt 1” and again on its uplifting companion, “Look Pt 2”: “Look how far you made it, look what you created.” The pair intentionally play off each other, not just lyrically but musically, too—they both sample his own unreleased soul song, with “Pt 2” flipping the track.
Album artwork for Shad’s Start Anew.
Part of Shad’s spiritual practice has been taking stock of how he feels, without attachment, and what’s actually transpired. He realized how hard it was to just acknowledge his own feelings. “If we’re lucky, our lives are pretty full and rich, and we don’t always take just a simple accounting of what’s happened—this great interaction, this really hard conversation, whatever it is,” he says. Self-awareness is really hard, he continues. “It’s hard to stop and just go, wow, yesterday I just played for 1,000 people. That was pretty cool. Eight months before that, two years before that, 10 years before, I wasn’t doing that. Damn, that’s great.”
“Raised on Dilla and Lauryn Hill,” as he quips on “Bars and BBQs,” Shad was still an undergrad student at Wilfred Laurier University when he broke out from London, Ontario, onto the Canadian music scene in the early 2000s. Since then, his signature combination of wit, introspection, and intelligent wordplay has established him as an unrivalled wordsmith and one of hip-hop’s most thoughtful artists. He is the most shortlist-nominated artist in Polaris Music Prize history. He’s also hosted CBC Radio’s Q and the Peabody and Emmy Award-winning docuseries Hip Hop Evolution.
But whether it’s systemic inequality or basketball, Shad always approaches his subject with honesty, clarity, and heart. It’s reflected in threads that connect across his body of work, themes that resurface through different perspectives depending on where he’s at in life. There’s a sense of hope, resilience, a quest for growth, for understanding of the human condition. It is, in part, what has defined his voice as an artist. On his last record, for example, 2021’s TAO, “Black Averageness” challenges definitions of excellence. It recalls “A Story No One Told” from Shad’s 2005 debut, When This Is Over, about an ordinary man on his deathbed reflecting on his life. There is beauty in the mundanity of everyday—something that, he notes, isn’t celebrated enough. “I grew up with that value of life has inherent value and dignity, and everybody should have access to that, a sense of that, you know? And it’s not predicated on anything else.”
His debut’s first track, “New School Leaders,” also hears him encouraging himself to realize his dreams of becoming a rapper and recognizing his own talent—a theme it shares with Start Anew 20 years later.
“I think what it always comes down to is, like, I’m saying the things that I need to hear,” he considers. “I’m basically always saying, ‘Keep going and don’t forget.’ That’s what I’ve been saying from the beginning. And I think what I’m still saying is keep going and don’t forget.”
Musically, Shad wanted Start Anew to be simple, warm, and approachable. He drew on his archive, sampling his own unreleased music, stuff he didn’t think was quite strong enough to exist on its own but could maybe still be used in some way. Part of doing that was, as DJ Jazzy Jeff famously said, to “die empty”: to share what you’ve got. Another was for the creative challenge. “I feel like I’ve had the opportunity to experiment a lot musically in my career, and I kind of didn’t want to do that too much with this album,” Shad says. Still, he says with a grin, “I also can’t resist a little bit of a challenge.”
The result is a sonic world that feels familiar yet fresh: jazz piano, record scratches, psychedelic etherealness, classic beats, and Shad on guitar, united by a distinct soulfulness. It reflects the album’s concept masterfully, as the rapper, through his easygoing delivery, beautifully weaves through lines about ego death (“Happiness”), water as metaphor for the nourishment and release of creativity (“Rain”), and the importance of community—the concept “islands of sanity”—especially the unsung heroes (“Islands”). Start Anew is filled with community, collaborators including producer Ric Notes, DJ TLO, rapper Raz Fresco, jazz-gospel singer Chantae Cann, and rapper-singer pHoenix Pagliacci. Some, like Ric Notes and TLO, have been with Shad since the beginning.
Related stories
- Vancouver Musician bbno$ Is Full of Gratitude and Excitement as His Star Rise
- 45 Years Ago, Vancouver Rock Legends Loverboy Bet Big on Themselves
- B.C. Musician-Filmmaker Ani Kyd Wolf Returns With a New Album and a New Outlook
“Somebody once said, ‘geography is destiny’—the people around you right now,” he says. He met core members of his team, including his manager and TLO, who still tours with Shad, while at Laurier—where he recently stepped in as a professor, teaching an academic course on hip-hop. He also co-taught a course at the University of Toronto. Education has always been deeply resonant in his work, and as somebody who is clearly a lifelong lover of learning, the role is wonderfully fitting.
“Probably my number one priority was community within that classroom,” he continues, “and I set out those priorities in the first lecture.
“I said, look, I remember being third year, fourth year at Laurier. That’s when I made my first album. That’s when I succumbed to this compulsion to make things. And who was around me at the time were these people, and they were also itching and ready to go. And so pay attention to who’s around you. So I tried to create opportunities for us to have class conversations and discussions about music, about things deeper than music, because let’s get to know each other.… These people around you, they’re there for a reason.”
After his time at Laurier, Shad headed west to attend Simon Fraser University, taking its graduate liberal studies program, an interdisciplinary master of arts program that allowed him to work on his music and build his career while studying part-time. He later lived in Vancouver between 2010 and 2015, near Commercial Drive. “I have a lot of fond memories,” he recalls with a smile: Okanagan peaches, playing basketball at Kits Beach and Strathcona Park, hanging out at The Waldorf down the street. “Just being with my neighbours and my friends around the Drive.
“It was an amazing, very beautiful time, you know, some of the best years of my life,” he continues. “And formative, as well. It was interesting coming from Southern Ontario to the West Coast. There’s just different ideas, a different lifestyle. It was an education, as well, for sure.”
As he reflects on two decades of making music, he feels grateful. “Persevering is something I’m proud of, and just committing to making things—I’m proud of that.” He adds, “I also feel almost mystical about it a little bit, if I can say that, if that doesn’t sound too naive or whatever. I’m a bit amazed at how life has unfolded, and it feels a little bit mystical, you know? Really does.”
It’s a strange compulsion, he notes, whether you’re a musician or writer or creative person, to make stuff, to bring your ideas into reality.
Something, to be sure, that takes courage. “And then when you get to participate in that for many years? It’s like, yeah, man. Wow. It’s a rich life. It’s more than anybody could ever ask for.”
Read more music stories.
