I find him in a corner of his lush studio space in the heart of Railtown, a community that lives between the neon signs and the few remaining underground venues in the city that are still moving and shaking despite Vancouver’s recent nightlife crackdowns. It’s a fraught area, one where arts and culture are booming, yet scrutiny toward the neighbourhood has intensified alongside the heavily publicized and politicized toxic drug/drug poisoning crisis. As a result, the area — long a hub for music and culture — has struggled under the weight of fines and nightlife restrictions.

It’s within this place that Baptiste has become a friendly neighbour, and with good reason. He’s one of those people you feel like you could tell your whole life story to without much forethought. That openness feels intentional. He’s immediately candid about his life and work, as well as his advocacy alongside others in the neighbourhood recovering from addiction.

“Part of this album is kind of destigmatizing addiction. And especially personally, for me, laying it all out on the table and just being like, ‘this is what I’m dealing with.’ I think once you make it very public, there’s a sense of accountability. You can’t really hide it because everyone knows. Vancouver is a very small city, so [now] if I go to The Fox and get shitfaced, people are like ‘oh, I thought you were the sober guy.’”

There’s a kind of secrecy that permeates addiction — something those who have experienced it know intimately. It’s a point we bond over. We both share a relationship to addiction, particularly through drinking. Baptiste understands how important it is to place these struggles out in the open, and he uses that as a guiding force in both his advocacy and his music.

He tells me much of the album was inspired by his work with the DUDES Club Society, an organization that seeks to “bring down the shields” of older Indigenous men in the process of overcoming addiction. Through his involvement, Baptiste focuses on building relationships with older Indigenous men, many of whom were raised within generations shaped by emotional repression and silence. The DUDES Club functions as a social third space more than anything else, but he explains its importance through small moments: sitting beside someone over a game of cards and slowly allowing them to open up. It’s clear that creating space for those conversations is just as important to Baptiste as it is to the men he works with.

Likewise, interviewing Baptiste feels more like sitting down with an old friend than conducting an interview for work. He speaks about the importance of cultivating familiarity and community within advocacy work — the value of meeting people where they are as they begin to unravel their own complicated narratives. In both this record and his advocacy, Baptiste seeks to place those struggles in plain view. It’s easy to talk to him.

His album Lived Experiences in East Van places those stories within the context of the city we both attempt to live in while reconciling those urges — working to be open about nuance, addiction, his Indigenous community, and the ways those experiences intersect with class. East Van is a place we both love and participate in, yet it can still feel like somewhere that threatens to swallow you whole. Lived Experiences in East Van is about precisely that: loving a city that doesn’t always love you back.

“A lot of people view the Downtown Eastside as a stain on the city, which is this gross generalization that fails to recognize individual and infrastructural issues. A lot of people have these shortsighted ideas like… ‘why don’t you just get a job.’ And it fails to understand what I like to call an empathy gap. Especially if you’ve grown up in a middle class family, it’s hard to understand coming from a place where you didn’t have any support.”

The record also pays homage to the specific language and signifiers of the community in songs like “Kid on the Block,” a phrase used by people on the street to alert one another when children are nearby, helping keep kids safe from needles and broken glass. In many ways, the album acts as an homage to a community that continues to survive and care for itself despite how difficult life in the city can be.

Fittingly, Baptiste has promoted the release party for Lived Experiences in East Van in true DIY fashion: walking through East Van with posters, a bucket of glue, and a willingness to do the work himself. He’s promoting his upcoming May 16 show at Green Auto. He tells me it felt good to return to that kind of grassroots promotion, and that it makes sense for the kind of music he’s making. It’s a record deeply rooted in the city, yet universal in its story. By talking specifically about Vancouver, Baptiste accesses something that resonates far beyond city limits.