Melanie Brulée (episode 26)

Melanie Brulée is a bilingual singer/songwriter originally from Cornwall, Ontario. She spent much of her 20s living in Australia, where she first picked up a guitar and developed an interest in singing and songwriting.

She came back to Canada and quickly established herself on stages and at festivals across Canada and in the United States. She’s got two full-length albums out, a French-language album called Débridée, which came out in 2015, and an English language album, Fires, Floods, and Things We Leave Behind, which came out in 2018.

As you’ll hear in our interview, after some intense touring and hard work promoting that album, Melanie found herself burned out and questioning the direction she was headed in.

A step away from music allowed her to focus on other areas of interest, including mental illness and mental health, which took on new importance for her after she learned, long after the fact, that her estranged father had taken his own life. This led her to learn more about mental illness and deal with mental health issues of her own.

In conjunction with Mental Illness Awareness Week 2020, Melanie organized a series of conversations about mental health on Instagram Live and released a powerful song and video called “The Mess,” which is a take on an all-too-familiar inner struggle: a showdown between Anxiety and Depression, each fighting for power over its host, leaving THE MESS in the wake.

This year, she released another powerful song and video relating to the topic, this time in French, called “Crier.”

More information, videos, and music credits: https://wp.me/pdcjXL-83