Ghostkeeper Find Joy in New Noises

The pop experimentalists return to their roots while pushing their creativity forward on new album, Cîpayak Joy.

By Leslie Ken Chu

Photo by Jared Sych

Published on August 21, 2024

Ghostkeeper are ever-evolving. Since debuting in 2008 with Children of the Great Northern Muskeg, the Calgary band has shifted more and more from ramblin’ blues and country rock to experimental electronic pop. On their latest album Cîpayak Joy, which follows 2022’s Polaris-longlisted Multidimensional Culture, Ghostkeeper continue morphing, but they also come full circle.

In recent years, Ghostkeeper operated as a quintet, but on Cîpayak Joy, they stripped back down to founding couple Shane Ghostkeeper and Sarah Houle, just like on their debut. They also enlisted longtime engineer Brad Hawkins and producer Jay Crocker, best known for his experimental sound project JOYFULTALK; Crocker also played guitar in one of Ghostkeeper’s earliest iterations before recording and producing some of their oldest albums.

“Jay really helped cultivate the early sounds of Ghostkeeper. It’s really interesting that we connected and are still on a similar parallel path,” Sarah says.

“We really cherish our relationship with Jay,” Shane adds. “He’s a true brother. It’s exciting and it feels really good to work with him again.”

On Cîpayak Joy, Ghostkeeper took a new approach: improvisation. Brad would hit record, Sarah would start a beat, then she and Shane would go from there. As the duo recorded tracks, they handed them off to Jay, who then had free reign with them. Jay was so instrumental to the new album, Ghostkeeper added “Joy” to the album title in tribute.

Making Cîpayak Joy was such an exciting, fresh experience, Ghostkeeper even considered releasing it under a new band name, Cîpayak, the Cree word for “the ghosts are dancing.” But, Sarah explains, “We have experimented in the past with a lot of different sounds and approaches, so it is still a Ghostkeeper project essentially, so we just kept it as that.”

Cîpayak Joy is full of layers. Falsetto chants float above cloudy electronic beats and guitar riffs. The album is celebratory, evoking peace, safety, harmony, and a nurturing life. “‘Dark at the Helm’ and ‘Storm Chaser’ both are about being inspired by love and romance to face our demons, and to be aware that we all have a darkness,” Shane explains. “We can’t forget or try to deny that there is darkness as well as light in all of us. And romance is a way to face that. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be together any longer, if one person was in denial.”

Featuring duets between the couple, Cîpayak Joy drew large inspiration from doo-wop. “Because it was just the two of us too, the themes of relationships and love and romance and the struggles around that really came through,” Sarah says.

“Needing to be immediate, really the best choice to find immediacy in lyrics is to utilize our own stories,” Shane adds.

Though Ghostkeeper are forward-thinking in their creative approach, they remember the band’s past fondly. “I miss playing the drums sometimes, because that’s how we wrote,” Sarah reflects. “We didn’t even ever go to the mountains, and we live in Calgary. We’d just be in the basement playing music all the time. We’d go out and maybe watch a band for inspiration…”

“…and come home and jam some more,” Shane jumps in, finishing her sentence. “Just the freedom of playing rock and roll, and being so passionate about it and having that kind of energy to put into it – those were good memories.”

Despite those memories, Shane says they’re no longer interested in being technically proficient. Instead, Ghostkeeper has become a platform for exploring sounds. “We’re just having lots of fun experimenting and making all kinds of new noises.”