INTERVIEW: Canada’s Billianne on her debut album Modes of Transportation: “How you build an artist is that you release original music. You tell your own story.”

Words: Emma Driver
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Nadia Doss

Billianne, the Canadian singer/songwriter with a “voice like a campfire”, has had a truly wild ride in the last four years. She first popped up on the music radar back in October 2021, when her solo version of Tina Turner’s ‘Simply the Best’ went viral on TikTok. At the time she was eighteen years old, living with her family in Milton, Ontario, south-west of Toronto city. There was no trick or artifice to her video – just her rich voice and a directness of interpretation that brought the lyrics to life. Cue millions of likes and thousands of fans, and Billianne was on her way.

‘Simply the Best’ became her first official release in 2022, followed by her version of ‘Que Sera Sera’, the classic song first performed by Doris Day in the mid-’50s. But then Billianne made her next musical intention clear: she was a songwriter, and original material – worked up with her collaborators Nick Ferraro and Duncan Hood – began to flow out of her. There was 2023’s ‘A Little Older’, a quiet take on “growing out of all the places I love”: getting older, maybe a little nostalgic, but knowing that the world keeps turning. Then came the EP The Things We Talk About, and a scattering of singles through 2024. Meanwhile Billianne went on the road for festival shows, tours with other artists and her own solo spots, and somehow managed to assemble a debut album in the middle of it all.

Now that debut, Modes of Transportation, has arrived, like a perfectly timed train to the platform. Journeys and travels across time and landscapes feature in the songs, deliberately – it’s a concept album, but the metaphors are naturally woven in, never heavy-handed.

The sound of the album has a light touch too. It opens with ‘Modes I’ as piano takes the lead, winding around Billianne’s expertly steered vocal. She may only be twenty-two now, but she has a natural gift for conveying the precise sense of every lyric. “God knows that I can’t stay the same / Everything is changing except for you,” she sings, setting up the forward motion of the album: there is change, but also a clear-eyed way of looking back, of treasuring the people and the feelings as they once were.

‘Jessie’s Comet’ brings this into focus: a song about sisterly love and how it endures through the separations of life. Subtle banjo sets up the rhythm, bringing an optimistic lift, and violin accents add to the country-ish feel. Billianne’s playing with the melody in later verses feels effortless but never overdone; her musicality is undeniable.

The pace picks up with songs like ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘Crush’, and Billianne handles the transition easily. These are up-tempo, indie-pop gems, with cheerfully sing-shouted backing vocals, melodies that climb and build, and rapid-fire vocals that show how instinctively she handles the tempo shift (even if she did have to dedicate some practice time to those staccato parts, as she tells us in the interview below). Calling herself a “long-time Swiftie”, Billianne has absorbed a little sonic influence from Swift on these tracks, but that’s no bad thing – the soaked synth layers and surging backing vocals suit her songs, and the gently questioning lyrics are all her own.

Simpler production, a strummed acoustic guitar and a gradual layering up give ‘Cassiopeia’ a quiet power, while ‘Future Emma’ begins as just voice and guitar but by the end has thrown everything in the studio at an epic outro, with cymbals crashing and Billianne’s voice flying high. The song urges someone – a friend going through a tough time, maybe – to remember that things will one day be different: “The smoke’s gonna clear eventually / And you know it.” The immensity of the song’s ending captures how good the future could be, a sense of all the possibilities of life unfolding.

A trio of songs – ‘Wishlist’, ‘Memories’ and ‘Let Me Run’ – round off the album before ‘Modes II’ closes it out. ‘Wishlist’ is built on a solid beat and a simple guitar line, and it too takes the need for change as a theme: “Some things never really fall into place / But something here has gotta change.” The guitar grows more insistent as Billianne’s lyric gets more determined, arguing against the status quo. ‘Memories’ welcomes back the banjo, then a double-time kick drum propels the song along, with Billianne switching easily between her high, clear tones and deeper accents: “Trying to live with all these memories / … All I have is only memories,” she sings. Sadness seeps in, but the pulse keeps going, in that relentless way life has of going on around us. ‘Let Me Run’ would fit perfectly on a Bon Iver or Lizzy McAlpine album; its repeated refrain, “Let me go …”, strikes at an emotional core, while the lyric shows off Billianne’s command of complicated rhythm. “Does anyone ever really know themselves at all? / Can I let myself down gently between these aluminum walls / Not living for the eyes of them all?” comes out in a rush, but with a ringing clarity.

Then ‘Modes II’ bookends the journey, its background twitterings suiting the open plains and clear sky of the lyric. Over a bare guitar part, Billianne sings of the feeling that things are “slowly coming loose” – what happens if she rattles out of her socket too? Her story is just beginning, not ending, and this bookend is more of a temporary marker, holding space until the next volume arrives.

Modes of Transportation is an emotional and sensitively crafted album, and it moves and shifts from beginning to end. It seems obvious that Billianne, with her vocal richness and gift for bringing nuance and meaning to every word she writes, will be able to tackle whatever musical challenge she dreams up for herself next.

Women In Pop’s Jett Tattersall spoke with Billianne just ahead of her album release, and found out just how far she’s come in the four years since her TikTok monster hit.

Billianne, it’s really lovely to have heard this gorgeous album and to be chatting with you today. Your cover of ‘Simply the Best’ has been one of my favourites – I think I had it on a loop for a while there. So thank you very much.
Thanks so much. I’m so glad you like it!

First of all, congratulations. Modes of Transportation is such a cracking album. How are things right now in your very musical world?
Things are good. Things are very busy … we’re finishing up some mixes right now, and we’re creating visuals for me to post. And it’s really fun, very busy. But feels good. I always want to make sure I’m having fun. If I’m not having fun, something’s wrong. [laughs]

Yes! Now, let’s talk about the album title. Apart from the travel and the transportation, it’s also a self-transformation. What does this title mean for you and the collection as a whole?
When I entered the music industry – whatever that means! – all of a sudden I was doing a bunch of writing sessions and sessions with people, and touring, joining tours, opening for people across America, being on tour buses, taking flights for the first time, being in airports for the first time, taking the train down to Toronto for the first time too. So I was using all these different literal modes of transportation to get to these places where I write a song, or I’m in a new place for the first time, and I’m growing. So this album is all those things – and these songs were written literally along the way in that journey as well.

I knew I wanted to have some sort of overarching concept for my first album. I love when I see that in a project. So I wanted it to be a fun thing for people to try to find the little moments in each song that relate back to the title, too.

I love that – the metaphorical and literal meaning,
Yes! I’m a big fan of trains and planes, but also a big fan of changing and growing up.

And they come together so gorgeously. Speaking of this notion of growing up, let’s talk about ‘Jessie’s Comet’, a song you sneakily played live for the first time recently. Can you talk a little bit about the story on this one?
It’s me talking to my sister, being like, “You’re not so far – I can always visit you, but I miss you a lot, and I’m sad our childhood is over.” That’s basically the song in a nutshell.

This song took a big journey for us. Usually when we [Billianne and co-writers Nick Ferraro and Duncan Hood] write songs, we have the song in the first demo. But this one started out as something completely different – it even had a different chorus. We were sitting down, [thinking] something about this is not working. And then I started talking about how my sister had recently moved out, and I was so used to her just being down the hall, and remembering this night when we were up north, and we were writing music, and I was looking up at the comets in the sky, and I knew she was looking at them. We were talking about that while writing this chorus that you hear in the song.

It feels like a song that doesn’t just come from the heart – it genuinely does come from the home. Was there something freeing about that, or was it a little nerve-racking knowing that it was going to be released on the album?
A little nerve-racking, but I think a lot of it was freeing. Some of the lyrics are pretty blunt – in the second verse, “Since you let me down, I tried to unmake you” is something I wouldn’t say in real life, and to her, because it feels mean, but in a song you get the whole story. So it felt freeing in that way – I can say these things and they can be lit by the positives in the chorus, saying, “You’re always here. You’re always around and you’re never gonna leave me.” And I hope people see themselves and their own relationships in it too.

It’s really beautiful. Your voice has such gravitas to it – like you sing from the depths of the past, of singers gone. It’s almost … Dickensian?
I really like that. I need that on a T-shirt or something!

When did you first realise that not everyone sang like you did?
When I first went viral. Growing up, I always had my close family and close friends saying, “You’re such a good singer.” I’d be like, “Okay, well, you’re my mom, so you’re gonna say I’m a good singer.” [laughs] So it wasn’t until I posted that TikTok [‘Simply the Best’], and I got those external people being like, “Your voice sounds like a campfire” … that was the first time I think I realised, “Oh, okay, I can probably do something with this, for real.” So I think that was the moment for me, that night in October 2021.

How does it feel now to step into this chapter as a songwriter? How has that process been?
Like we were saying before, it’s freeing in a lot of ways. It’s my way of letting people know who I am … I think when it’s my voice and my own story, it’s just a deeper feeling for me. Switching to original music was definitely hard and stressful, and there were some people on my team way back then, who are not my team anymore, who just didn’t want to make that jump with me to do original music. So there was some hardship that I had to go through. But on the other side, I’m so glad that I’m releasing original music. I know it’s right.

It’s interesting to hear that still there’s a hesitancy within the industry about releasing original songs. It kind of blows my mind.
I think when TikTok was on the rise, a lot of the things that were going viral were covers. So it’s understandable – at the time. The label knew what worked. So they were very logical about everything. But it’s a shame, because I feel how you build an artist is that you release original music. You tell your own story. So hopefully more labels are doing that nowadays. That was around 2022, so maybe it’s turning away [from that] now.

Are there any particular tracks on this album that you feel your audience – the people who have been with you from the beginning – are going to be quite surprised about?
My fans are used to ‘Simply the Best’ or softer stuff in general. That’s what I post, and that’s what I love, too. But some of the songs I’ve released already, the lyrical stuff like ‘Baby Blue’ and ‘Crush’, those were the scariest ones to put out, but luckily [they were] received well. There’s a couple other little outliers on the album – ‘Memories’ is one that comes to mind. I do always get a little worried before releasing, but so far, it’s been open arms for all my music people. The people in my DMs are just like, “I love it”, which is great [laughs]. I think maybe they just like my voice, and the way through everything? Whether the lyrics are a little more blunt or whether they’re more metaphorical, I think people connect to [my voice], which is a good thing.

From where you started to now, with that freeing notion of singing your own songs, how do you think your sound has shifted?
I think it definitely has. With each song on the album, I feel it approached everything in a different way … There are songs where I’m whispering and I’m really close to the microphone, and then there’s a song like ‘Crush’, with staccato words in the chorus. And I had never, ever done that before. It was really difficult to get those staccatos in there! [laughs] So it’s a muscle that I just continued to grow, how to utilise my voice, and all these different avenues of my voice – like the big, belty part and the softer part of it, and how to let that shine … The options are endless too, which is the hardest part. It’s like, “I could do anything right now”, but who knows what’s right?

Let’s talk about the album’s bookends, ‘Modes I’ and ‘Modes II’, which open and close the journey and frame the story. What inspired you to frame the album like that? Were there other albums you’d loved that did that? Or was it, like, tapping in and off a mode of transport, maybe?
[laughs] I love that! I wish I’d thought of that. Maybe next time someone asks me that question, that’s what I’ll say: “Tappin’ in, tappin’ off”! I love albums that do that, where there are those two [ends] … something that just feels like it’s bringing you home and it’s bringing you in. So that was very intentional. And actually, those two songs started as one song, and then we split them apart. Then these bookends would sound similar, but also sound different to show the change [through] the course of the album. One’s driven by guitar and the first one is piano. So it’s like coming from one place to another.

I love that. You have been touring with and sharing stages with some incredible women, Julia Jacklin, K.T. Tunstall … Were there any moments in those experiences that really shaped how you’re making music now?
Definitely yes, through performing. Every time you open for someone, you get to watch them over and over, every single night. And you see how they interact with the audience and how the audience interacts with the music, and so that alone is so inspiring. Particularly the tour I did with [Australian band] Hollow Coves. I opened for them for a month-long tour, and every single night I saw the same set, and saw how the audience reacted. And on the bigger songs, when all the phones come out and people are doing their flashlights. So I find doing live music just inspires me to want to just make my shows really, really good.

How has that live element been for you? You came from a place of having your audience online, then moved into this sphere of having a physical audience. Was that horrible? Or is it your favourite part?
It could have easily been horrible, yes, but it turned to be my favourite part. I love meeting people. Every time I leave a tour, I do dip into a little bit of a depression, because being on tour is just such a rush. Every single night, you’re meeting people, and they’re coming up to you, and they’re saying the nicest things you’ll ever hear, and they’re complimenting you, and they’re buying your merch. I have a little notebook on the merch table that people can sign and leave a note in, and it’s just such a positive experience. Of course, [touring] is hard. But I just love doing shows and meeting people. I think it might be one of my favourite parts of this job.

That is great to hear. It always sounds terrifying to go from online releases to a massive live show. Lastly, before we leave you, if there was a trinity of albums that would get you through your longest journeys on transportation, what would those albums be?
You want three? Okay. One of them is Calico by Ryan Beatty. That is one of my all-time favourite albums. It is so good. It got me through last winter for sure.

Then The Party by Andy Shauf. That inspired me to do a concept album. Andy Shauf is so cool. He’s a Canadian guy, and a legend to me.

And then the third one is Messy by Olivia Dean. Those are my big three.

Thank you so much for your time, Billianne, and your beautiful album.
Oh, thank you!

Billianne’s debut album Modes of Transportation is out now. You can buy, download and stream here.
Follow Billianne on her website, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok