A few weeks later, I went to watch them perform at XY, a small club on Davie Street. Dust, with their now-signature blue brows (courtesy of drag mother Shanda Leer), fuchsia-framed cat eyes, and thick lashes, took the stage as if they had a million times, not a handful. If Dust had any nerves, it was impossible to tell. They were radiant. Confident and comfortable, like the stage was home. A natural. And the crowd loved them.

Over the next five years, Dust cemented themselves as a fixture in Vancouver’s drag scene. In 2017, they founded Sleepy Queers Productions, through which they created and hosted Commercial Drag, a bi-weekly drag show. They co-created and co-hosted Yuk it Up Sis, the only all-drag comedy show in the history of the iconic comedy club Yuk Yuk’s. They wrote and produced three musicals: Sleepy Girls Save the World, X-Mas: Days of Christmas Past, and Sleepy Girls Save the World: Here We Go Again. 

Music is something Dust always loved incorporating into their drag—it’s been an ever-present force in their life, with bands like Counting Crows and The Cranberries soundtracking their childhood—and now, Dust is preparing to release their debut album in 2022. Its lead single, “INNUENDO,” is a joyful entry point that sonically nods to pop-rock inspirations like Third Eye Blind and Matchbox Twenty with vibrant, rhythmic guitar and a seriously catchy hook. The song is about Dust’s first boyfriend and explores the nuances of queer emotions in certain circumstances. “It took me four minutes to write the lyrics,” Dust says, speaking over Zoom. The words rushed to them suddenly as they walked through a Save-On-Foods in Cranbrook—the same grocery store Dust’s first boyfriend worked at when they were 18. 

“INNUENDO,” Dust continues, references that “first love that you think is love, but is actually just lust—and trying to understand the nuances of relationships, when you don’t actually understand romance itself.” Being an aromantic person, experiencing that is doubly difficult for them, Dust adds, because romance is not something that comes naturally. Sexuality and physicality, yes, but romance not necessarily. It’s like a giant grandiose performance. “In the lyrics, it’s very mirrored about the performance of it. You try and say something, you try and do something, you try and perform what this thing is in order to achieve the thing that you want instead of directly communicating.”

In its early form, “INNUENDO” had more of a hyper-pop sound. But Dust admittedly struggled finding their voice inside those arrangements. Sitting down in the studio with producer Josh Eastman, they began doing vocal warmups on acoustic guitar. Something clicked. Dust and Eastman spent the next three days re-imagining the song through a more alternative pop-rock lens. It’s a sound that inspires Dust to keep moving forward as an artist still intently developing their craft. 

“’INNUENDO’ is the perfectly imperfect song for me to introduce myself to the world,” they say. “My drag has always been about imperfectionism. Now that I’m in this process and I’m growing, I know that I need to let things go out into the world and I’m okay with that. But I also know that every time I work on a song, [I’m] just adding more layers of detail [to the evolution of this project].”

Dust began making music, for the first time, at the start of the pandemic. They recorded five demos in their closet—including covers of Bruce Springsteen and Jann Arden—and released them as the cheekily titled EP, AMATEUR. Then, they decided to move back to Alberta. A fews days after Dust arrived, their father suffered an aneurysm. Two weeks after that, he passed away. “I experienced grief and still, to this day, experience grief for it,” Dust says. “It was a difficult relationship. And so when he passed, I was a little bit taken aback by my own personal response to it. I knew that I needed some sort of creative outlet and I wanted that to be music.”

They soon connected with Eastman, founder of Helm Studios, a Vancouver-based non-profit creative space that helps facilitate accessible music creation for systematically marginalized artists. The collaborative relationship between Dust and Eastman is supportive and synergetic, with Dust penning lyrics and Eastman taking charge of music composition. Dust’s songs, at first, were sad. “It was like if Phoebe Bridgers was a drag queen,” they quip with a laugh. But when “INNUENDO” came, the floodgates opened and songs poured out.