Kaeley Jade – Edmonton-based singer, songwriter, actress, composer, graphic designer etc. – has been hitting the road hard this summer.
“I’d say I’ve played twice the shows this summer that I played the last,” she says. “It’s been awesome. Connecting with so many people has been such a cool thing, too, it’s been a huge positive takeaway from the summer.”
She’s taking none of it for granted.
The multi-talented Métis artist graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting from the University of Alberta. In 2020. “Which I like to say is clearly the best time to graduate with a performance degree,” she laughs.
She didn’t allow the pandemic to slow her down. She studied sound design with the Citadel Theatre RBC Horizon Emerging Artist Program. She was a part of the RBCxMusic First Up Program and Manitoba Music’s Indigenous Music Residency, among other initatives. She researched. She wrote songs.
“It was really important to me to just continue to build my toolkit as an artist,” Kaeley says. “I feel like I found a lot of ways to make things happen, for myself and for my career, in spite of everything.”
And now she’s putting that toolkit to work. She just played the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. “It was a dream of mine for a very long time to get to play there,” she says, “so I’m just super happy and excited about it.”
Before, she’d always been on the hill, watching the stage. “And now I got to have the performer’s perspective and see all the beautiful people on the beautiful tarps all over the place. It was pretty surreal.”
Up next: Kaeley performs at Sounds from the Valley at Snow Valley Ski Club on August 29. Then a show with Jay Gilday at the Arden Theatre’s Arden Plaza Series in St. Albert.
“I’m really looking forward to it,” Kaeley says, of the Arden show. “Jay and I have run into each other a lot, I think especially because we’re both Indigenous artists, we get drawn together in different spaces and places for different reasons. I’m super excited to share the bill with him.”
Kaeley plays a free show at Sounds from the Valley at the Snow Valley Ski Club on August 29.
Kaeley Jade and Jay Gilday play the Arden Theatre’s Arden Plaza Series in St. Albert on August 31.
