Carlyn Bezic’s Second Life

After a near-fatal crash and a reckoning with illness, the Toronto artist rediscovers her power through Jane Inc.’s most urgent album yet.

By Emma Johnston-Wheeler

Photo by Kirk Lisaj

Published on October 15, 2025

When a semi-truck plowed into the van carrying Carlyn Bezic and her bandmates while on tour in 2023, everything she thought she knew about herself was suddenly up for review. In the months that followed, she ended a decade-long relationship, was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, and learned she had early-stage vocal-cord cancer.

From that period of collapse came A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH — the third album from her solo project Jane Inc., and the sound of an artist rebuilding from the wreckage, searching for renewal in the wake of so much loss.

“I think Jane, to me, is the version of myself that’s unselfconscious and free and powerful and intimidating and aggressive and erotic,” says Bezic reflecting on what it means to inhabit her stage persona. “She’s really comfortable with all those things.”

I see Bezic stroll up from the window of Toronto’s Wallace Espresso, the small, no-frills coffee bar tucked into the Wallace Emerson neighbourhood, where we’ve agreed to meet on an overcast day. She’s wearing black biker shorts and a black tank top paired with an army-green jacket. She gives an impression of quiet confidence, neither intimidating nor aggressive.

As we cross the intersection towards the nearby train tracks so I can take photos of her, she recognizes two people she knows, on opposite sides of the street. As she waves, the friendly-neighbourhood-artist impression that this paints makes her laugh.

Bezic admits that she instructed herself not to come across as uncertain or self-doubting in our interview, but both themes come up in conversation. There’s resolve in the way she discusses feeling both that affirms the inevitability of the existential conflicts that every creative contends with. It doesn’t feel like she inhibits either trait, but rather has learned from them.

When asked if she’s comfortable sharing more details about the catalytic car crash that prompted her new album, Bezic pauses for just a moment. “That car accident just changed everything,” she says.

Bezic had been on tour with U.S. Girls in April of 2023 in Massachusetts when a semi-truck slammed into the broken-down tour van carrying her and five other musicians. Miraculously everyone survived, except, maybe, Bezic’s former self?

“Going on the tour, I was like, ‘I’m going to be really healthy, I’m going to keep running, I don’t think I’m gonna drink.’ And then that happened, and I was just like, fuck ittttt!,” says Bezic. “Everything just turned on its head.”

She describes a sense of invincibility in the immediate aftermath of the crash that allowed her to perform with an abandon she’d never experienced before. The audience felt like a protective shield for her vulnerability. “The dancing itself was so life-giving, and being a performer on stage…I was powerful,” she says.

This feeling is palpable in the single “Elastic,” which is accompanied by a self-taped music video of Bezic dancing in an unabashed, no-one-is-watching manner. She sings, “I want to get closer to death, feel it shatter against my head.” “I feel like I give an energy on stage that can add to what the song means. So I thought, I’ll just film myself dancing,” she explains. “I was trying to be not so precious about it.”

When Bezic arrived home from the tour and the adrenaline of her near-death experience began to wear off, she was hit with a lot of emotions at once. On one hand, she felt a spiritually deepened commitment to music. On the other, she found herself questioning everything in her life and reassessing what truly mattered to her. “It was just so clarifying,” she says.

She processed many of her emotions by turning them into song lyrics. “I was kind of obsessed with what the car accident meant to me and how it made me feel,” Bezic says. When asked what matters most to her now, she says art and the people that she loves.

As her personal evolution continued to take hold, Bezic found herself departing a 10-year relationship. Around the same time, she also received a diagnosis for an autoimmune disease in response to an amalgamation of long unexplained health symptoms that had flared in the wake of the car accident. “There was this kind of identity shift where I was like, ‘oh, now I’m a person with this chronic illness I’m going to have for the rest of my life. And I’m no longer the person I was when I was with my ex’,” she reflects.

Concurrently, she was experiencing increasing issues with her voice. A doctor’s consultation resulted in a vocal-cord biopsy a year later, which identified the sample as cancerous. Since it was early stage, Bezic was told she could either do a surgery to remove part of her vocal cord, which would risk compromising her voice, or wait to see how it developed.

“I felt less confronted with my mortality than I had been during the car accident, but there was a more metaphysical experience of questioning ‘am I going to lose my instrument? Is it going to sound different? Am I going to be in treatment for the next number of months?’” She ultimately elected to have the surgery, and was told the surgeons were conservative in what they took off. “I came out of it and my voice is different, but I also feel like I’m singing better than ever in a way,” Bezic says now.

Through all of it, she continued to work on the new album on and off with co-producer Edwin de Goeij, whom she is now dating. “I had a real sense of urgency with this album, even though it did end up taking a long time. I just needed to express these things. I need them to be out of me,” she says. “When I listen to it, I can hear my urgency, for better and for worse.”

In her effort to use the album to articulate how the experiences of the past couple of years have changed her, Bezic says the song “What if?” might be the crux. It’s about knowing how scary life can be, and embracing it anyway.

“When I perform that song, I still get emotional doing it, because it feels like recommitting myself to the uncertainty of life, recommitting myself to all the pain and suffering and joy and beauty that is available to me and that will inevitably come to me,” she says.

Jane Inc.’s A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH is out October 17 via Telephone Explosion Records.