Jeremy Dutcher’s 2018 debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, was more than just a mere piece of music—it was a cultural rescue mission. That record was a means to preserve the language of Dutcher’s Wolastoqiyik ancestors, whose traditional songs were salvaged from early-20th-century wax-cylinder recordings and radically recontextualized through a bold fusion of jazz, chamber music, and post-rock. The album’s intriguing backstory and methodology—not to mention Dutcher’s commanding, flamboyant stage presence—brought Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa to audiences far beyond his home community, with Dutcher winning the 2018 Polaris Music Prize, collaborating with Yo-Yo Ma, and even landing a judge’s stint on Canada’s Drag Race. And those changing circumstances had a direct impact on how he approached album number two. “The first record was very focused on doing it for the people—I was doing it in their language so that they know it for them,” Dutcher tells Apple Music. “Then that record had all this success and had this whole life unto itself, so I knew I wanted to talk to an audience that was bigger than just my community.” Featuring string arrangements from Owen Pallett and songwriting contributions from Basia Bulat, Motewolonuwok further enhances its crossover appeal through Dutcher’s first vocal performances in English, with the combination of his heavenly croon and exploratory compositions suggesting Jeff Buckley fronting late-’80s Talk Talk. But if Dutcher is aware he’s singing to a wider audience, he’s by no means pandering to them. Like its predecessor, Motewolonuwok is a work that’s both fearless in its execution and overwhelming in its beauty, an album that bears the crushing weight of Indigenous history in Canada while striving to transcend it. Here, Dutcher unpacks the ancestral wisdom, inspirational poetry, and modern-day tragedies that spawned Motewolonuwok’s 11 tracks. “Skicinuwihkuk” “The lyrics are actually a quote from ancestors from 1763: 'As long as there's a child among my people, we will protect the land.' And as soon as I read that, I was like, ‘Holy shit!'—like, they've been saying that this long, and we're still saying that today.’ ‘Skicinuwihkuk’ is talking about 'the place where the Native people live,' or Indian land. So when I wanted to talk to non-Indigenous people with this record, that was the first statement: Here's who we are—we are people on this land. Get to know us, like we always could have, but we didn't, because we were scared of each other and we did that whole residential-school domination bullshit.” “Pomawsuwinuwok Wonakiyawolotuwok” “The title means 'the people are rising.' It's got this four-on-the-floor but really laidback vibe to it. It's like a jazz combo: There's drums, upright bass, trumpet, there's guitar—it gives me a Talk Talk Spirit of Eden vibe.” “Take My Hand” “My first record was inspired by a conversation that I had with an elder of mine, Maggie Paul—she was the one who encouraged me to go to the Canadian Museum of History and do that study that became Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa. Every time I'm home, I go visit her, and she always shares songs with me before I go. And this one time, she sang me a song in English, which has never happened before. It was just one verse: ‘Take my hand and walk with me.’ She said, ‘Go sing this for the young people, because they forgot how to love each other.’ But I was like, 'What am I going to do with this one verse?' So I took it to my friend Basia Bulat—we were doing a little songwriting session—and then I went away on tour. A week later, she sends me a video of her singing 'Take My Hand.' She says, 'I've sung this every day since we met—and here's seven verses for that song! Use what you want!’” “Wolasweltomultine” “I like writing songs that are a little bit episodic, like 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' where there's not really a chorus that comes back—it's more vignettes of sound. The first couple songs on the record are maybe more invitational, whereas this one is saying, 'We are here now—let's look at the splendor of community.' And that's what the choir on this song is representing: the communal response to a hard thing. That title means 'let's give thanks for life.'” “tahcuwi Anelsultipon” “This record is all about grief and love right up beside each other. That's the push and pull of this album: Don't stay in grief too long...but don't stay in love too long, either, or you get clouded. So we go from the big choir moment [on ‘Wolasweltomultine’] right down to the one voice/solo piano/cello moment.” “Sakom” “Sometimes you have to touch down on an island during a journey—you're going down the river and you've got to take a little break—and that's what this song is to me. The choir is just 12 of my friends that I really love to sing with. It was like band camp—we rented a coach bus in the middle of the pandemic, because I was like, ‘How am I going to record a room full of voices in a safe way?’ So everyone got their own row on the bus and we had COVID screenings. We recorded at this beautiful theater in Kingston, Ontario, called the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, and it was just so special.” “Ancestors Too Young” “From an emotional standpoint, this is the moment the record is leading to. Before I was doing music full time, I used to work at a national LGBT human-rights organization called Egale Canada, and I was working in remote First Nations communities doing LGBT 101 inclusion. And in one particular community in northern Ontario, I heard a story from a mother who had lost their daughter to suicide a year before, and it's because she was queer—she really didn't feel safe in her own community to actualize and be herself. So you start to pull the threads: ‘Why are there such huge rates of suicide in northern Indigenous communities—like, 6 to 10 times higher than the national average?’ Because it's a symptom of a much deeper cause. People feel hopeless, because reserves were not created to be thriving communities in rural Canada. They were there to get Native people out of sight, and we all are kind of culpable in this, because our comfort and our peace and placement is at somebody else's displacement. We don't think about that as a country very much, so I'm hoping that this song can create some kind of dialogue around that.” “The Land That Held Them” “Each verse is a particular vignette of modern Indigenous existence. I started to write this song right after Tina Fontaine's body was found [in 2014] in the Red River [in Manitoba], Colten Boushie was shot [in 2016 in Saskatchewan], and I also found out about Starlight Tours—that's when police in the Prairies would pick up intoxicated Indigenous people downtown in the middle of the winter, and they would drive them out to the outskirts of town and just drop them off. Many people died this way, and we don't really talk about it in this country. I love this place, I love my life, and yet, to open the newspaper and see the complete disregard for Indigenous life, it just doesn't compute.” “There I Wander” “The last three songs on the record were the first ones I wrote—they started out with a set of poems that I was really inspired by, from this Cherokee poet named Qwo-Li Driskill. The poems tell the story of a Navajo LGBT person who was murdered in the mid-’90s. I was also thinking about Chantel Moore, who was shot during a wellness check by the Edmundston Police in New Brunswick in 2020. I actually know her family quite well, and as we walked with her mother in that funeral line, it was totally silent. And the only thing you could hear was her mother, Martha, just absolutely wailing. I told [trumpeter] Lina [Allemano] this story right before she went in to do her take—I said, 'Just play grief.'” “Together We Emerge” “This is one of the most beautiful moments with the record for me—that choral moment where we sing ‘you will be our song’ over and over and over again. The love and the grief are both there, but let’s not deny any of that experience.” “Rise in Beauty” “‘From the heavy debris of loss, together we emerge,’ and then we ride—but we have to always do it in beauty. And not beauty in a commercial/magazine sense, but true beauty, and what the journey of it is to seek it and find it.”