When Dominique Fils-Aimé picks a colour for an album, she means it. Not in a branding sense, not as a mood board exercise. The purple that wraps her new record, My World Is the Sun, released February 20th, connects to a system she has been working through for two trilogies now, one that tracks colour, element, chakra, and emotional season all at once. It sounds elaborate until she explains it, and then it sounds obvious.
“Based on the continuity of it, I went from blue to red to yellow. And then from yellow to blue was green because of the mix of both. And now we’re at a point in the spiral where we’re hitting between the first one, the blue and the red one.” The blue album was water; the red was fire. Mix water and fire and you get steam, clouds, lift. “The concept of water and heat together creates clouds and the idea of elevation. There is a lot of desire to go higher in our mind frame, in our emotional state, and the hope that it can bring peace of mind, spiritual elevation.” The crown chakra, she adds, is purple: “that energetic point that lives and connects the physical parts of us and the higher energies that surround us and link us to the universe. So it all felt perfectly aligned that it would be purple.”
The album is the second chapter of her second trilogy, following Our Roots Run Deep (2023), and it carries the conceptual weight you’d expect, but it was largely written on the fly. “Everything in the album came spontaneously. Whatever I felt like I started thinking or there was more reflection involved, I would cancel the song. So I threw away a lot of songs and I kept only those that came completely out of the fun of creating and just the spur of the moment energy.”
The most personal moment on the record, though, was not spontaneous so much as it was found. While going through old cassettes, Fils-Aimé came across a recording of her mother singing for friends on a Sunday afternoon in the 1970s. “It was the very first song on the cassette that we found and it just hit my heart right away.” That recording opens the album. She then sings the same melody herself to close it out. “I wanted to close it as her singing to me and me being able to sing it back to her.” The final bonus track, a Francis Cabral song he originally wrote for his daughter, rounds out the gesture. “For me to be able to sing it for my mom felt like a good close of the loop.”
“Moonchild” is another track with a specific origin. It was written for a dancer friend named Axel, who had built a show around her desire to be seen as something other than invincible. “Everyone around her was expecting her to always be strong and powerful, and she was talking about her desire to be gentle and to be considered in her gentleness, her fragility, and to be allowed to be fragile. So I had written that song for her show, but it was also perfectly aligned with everything else that I wanted to share. When I made it, I wanted it to feel good to her, and therefore it was feeling good to my inner child.”
At nearly nine minutes and recorded in a single take, “Rhythm of Nature” is the album’s most demanding track, and also its most rewarding one. It doesn’t really work as background music. It asks you to sit with it. Fils-Aimé would be the first to tell you that trying to explain it is beside the point. “You have to feel it or it doesn’t make sense. You just have to be free and let it exist.”
That same openness runs through how she composes for her band. She writes gaps into songs on purpose, leaving room for soloists to respond in the moment. “I leave a lot of space in the drafts where I know this part is gonna be open for them to improvise. So it’s gonna be a piano solo or it’s gonna be a trumpet solo. Whatever comes to them as a solo is what we keep. We try to keep them one take so that it’s the moment.” On “Freedom Become,” the subject matter made it feel essential. “For me to sing about the notion of becoming free, it only made sense that there had to be a space for the musician to express their freedom through a solo or improvised moment, and they did it beautifully.”
The only track that breaks the mould structurally is “Going Home,” which grew out of a jam session with guitarist Nance. “He made this little loop that I really liked and then I started singing, and then I just kept it. That’s why it’s also a different energy, because it’s the only one that I didn’t sing everything on my own.”
Live, Fils-Aimé’s shows operate on their own logic. She rarely stops between songs. The set becomes something closer to a long meditation, and she goes somewhere in the middle of it. “Those moments on stage are just, it’s practically a form of blackout, but not really. It’s like you immerse yourself in it so much and you connect with the emotion and the sound in a way that there are no words, but there’s a feeling.” Over the past two years she has played more than 150 shows in 15 countries, and the strangeness of those moments hasn’t become routine. “Being able to create a space and a moment in time where we’re all connecting through that is something indescribable. It’s such a blessing, such a privilege to have those moments and have people open to living that moment with us.”
She puts a lot of stock in that collective energy offstage too, especially given how heavy the news can sit. Rather than trying to switch it off, she lets it coexist with the good stuff. “Focusing on gratitude has been something that helps me keep going. I don’t try to block it out; rather, I accept that they can coexist. The sadness for the state of the world and the joy for a moment with a friend can coexist.” She has a good line about why love needs to be applied generously and consistently: “It doesn’t take just one glass of water to clean a glass of mud. That’s why we need to multiply the amount of love, care, kindness that we give in the world, because it will always be needed to make sure that it counterbalances and eventually takes over the side that can be rooted in pain.”
The root issue, as she sees it, is that we have been sold a story about how we function. “The illusion that we’re all separate, because of the system and the way we have built our society through individualism and capitalism, creates an illusion that it’s a jungle, each meant for themselves. But it’s not true. We’re meant to be in community. We are interconnected. As long as we’re gonna behave like it’s just me, myself and I, we’re still gonna feel somewhere deep down that something is off.” The fix is not complicated, even if it takes work. “The only way to counter that is connection.”
Dominique Fils-Aimé brings My World Is the Sun to the Théâtre Maisonneuve on June 27th as part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival, where tickets are still available. “It’s a lot of fun to play live with the band,” she says. After 150-plus shows, she means it.
Watch the full interview below:
