The singer-songwriter from Cape Breton tapped into her troubled past to find her true voice and is now ready to take on the world<\/p>\n
Published May 01, 2026 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 Last updated 16\u00a0minutes ago \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 19 minute read<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n You can save this article by registering for free here<\/a>. Or sign-in<\/a> if you have an account.<\/p>\n VANCOUVER \u2014 The church of Goldie Boutilier is a broad one.<\/p>\n At her concert March 26 at Vancouver\u2019s Hollywood Theatre \u2014 the perfect venue for a chanteuse whose various pop-star personas are often inspired by old movies \u2014 the enthusiastic crowd responds to her proclamations about healing from past traumas like they\u2019re at a rock \u2019n\u2019 roll revival.<\/p>\n \u201cHealed people heal people,\u201d the singer-songwriter from Cape Breton proclaims from the stage as rapt Gen Xers turning 60 and Gen Z fans alike respond with their own brands of \u201cAmen.\u201d<\/p>\n Advertisement 2<\/p>\n This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.<\/p>\n THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS<\/p>\n Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.<\/p>\n Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. 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Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.<\/p>\n REGISTER \/ SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES<\/p>\n Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.<\/p>\n Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.<\/p>\n THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK.<\/p>\n Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.<\/p>\n Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an Account<\/p>\n or<\/p>\n Article content<\/p>\n Some fellow Cape Bretoners are in the crowd and are equally thrilled. \u201cI discovered her last year,\u201d Troy Macdonald from New Waterford tells the National Post. \u201cHer sound is unique, but she\u2019s definitely got the Cape Breton spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n Long Story<\/p>\n Thanks for signing up!<\/p>\n Article content<\/p>\n Donald Ross from Bedoc tells the National Post he became a fan when \u201cI saw the documentary video<\/a> (for her song Emerald Year) about her being from a small town \u2014 getting signed to a label in L.A. and then eventually finding her true voice. When you find your own voice, this is what you get. She\u2019s an amazing songwriter. She\u2019s honest \u2014 that\u2019s what we Cape Bretoners are known for.\u201d<\/p>\n After signing her first record deal at age 21 and moving to L.A. from her tiny hometown of Reserve Mines, N.S., Goldie found herself \u201cswallowed up by the cold-blooded chaos of the music business,\u201d according to her bio. She found a lifeline in the anti-heroes of her beloved films.<\/p>\n \u201cMovies like Scarface and Casino helped me create the character I became to deal with everything: a femme fatale who uses her femininity to claw her way to the top of a corrupt world,\u201d Goldie says. \u201cInstead of waiting for someone to come along and save me, I became that character to save myself.\u201d<\/p>\n If you haven\u2019t heard of her, you soon will. The gospel of Goldie is spreading. The 40-year-old singer-songwriter was nominated for breakthrough artist of the year at the Junos, and in seven categories at the upcoming East Coast Music awards<\/a> on May 21, in Sydney, N.S., where she is scheduled to perform. She is fresh from sold-out shows on her North American King of Possibilities tour. Her new album, Goldie Boutilier Presents Goldie Montana, arrived on the heels of an acclaimed run of EPs \u2014 2022\u2019s Cowboy Gangster Politician; 2023\u2019s Emerald Year; 2024\u2019s The Actress \u2014 and marks the critically acclaimed artist\u2019s most bravely confessional body of work to date. Goldie Montana\u2019s strength comes from its raw honesty as the singer revisits past hardships.<\/p>\n Article content<\/p>\n Reaching more than 50 million total streams on Spotify, her sultry single King of Possibilities<\/a> is the opening theme song of the hit Netflix series The Hunting Wives.<\/p>\n In 2025, Goldie opened for Katy Perry on her Lifetimes Arena Tour in the U.K., and was named by Billboard Canada as one of its Artist Spotlights<\/a> for its annual Women in Music 2025 list. She was a hit at iconic festivals such as Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza and the All Things Go festival in New York.<\/p>\n Her fans include the likes of Elton John and superstar DJ Zane Lowe. Even Kelly Clarkson has covered Goldie\u2019s song, The Angel and the Saint. You can catch her at North American festivals this summer, such as Bonnaroo (Manchester, TN), Lollapalooza (Chicago) and Bumbershoot (Seattle). Or book a ticket to her EU-U.K. tour this fall (tour dates haven\u2019t been announced).<\/p>\n Boutilier\u2019s unique appeal is her ability to combine raw authenticity and songs that tap into her troubled past \u2014 hinted at in the video \u2014 with a glam-rock drama. She channels characters from out of thin air that manage to feel both imaginary and genuine at once.<\/p>\n Seemingly summoned from the void, but also from her own history, this petite blonde powerhouse of a singer has been a girl from Reserve Mines, an exploited performer in L.A., and an empowered survivor who has lived to tell her tale. She has had at least nine lives \u2014 and they all come through in her music.<\/p>\n Article content<\/p>\n Article content<\/p>\n Her current character is Goldie Montana, a Sharon Stone-Casino-inspired apparition \u201cwith the heart of a child and the mind of a sniper,\u201d she tells the National Post.<\/p>\n She emerges on stage like an alluring warrior \u2014 one part Chanel complete with a string of pearls, one part true grit \u2014 to sing At the End of the War. The song from Goldie Montana is an eerily apropos opening against the backdrop of the Iran war.<\/p>\n At the end of the war As she sings, one wonders if she\u2019s singing about shell-shocked returning vets she knew \u2014 or about herself. Boutilier has definitely been through the wars. But she has returned triumphant.<\/p>\n As she partly documents in the autobiographical video for her 2023 song Emerald Year, she grew up in working-class Reserve Mines in Cape Breton, where her father, who dropped out of school in his teens to work in the mines, owned a junkyard. Born in 1985, she came of age as the mines and the fisheries that sustained the local economy were shutting down.<\/p>\n Article content<\/p>\n Music and theatre became a lifeline for young Boutilier, and she left at age 17 to live in Victoria with her older sister, who was in the Canadian navy. It was the era of Justin Bieber, when unknowns could become stars via homemade YouTube videos. And that\u2019s exactly what she did.<\/p>\n She was discovered by One Republic member Ryan Tedder and soon signed a recording contract in L.A. with Interscope. Born Kristin Kathleen Boutilier, and nicknamed \u201cGoldie\u201d as a child, she adopted the alias My Name is Kay and released a self-titled EP in 2011. Her debut album My Name is Kay was released in 2013.<\/p>\n But what looked like commercial success on the surface belied inner and outer turmoil.<\/p>\n As she voices in the Emerald Year video, \u201cI spent years shelved. I didn\u2019t release music. I was shuffled around from person to person at the label. I remember walking in the front door at Interscope and they didn\u2019t even know I was an artist \u2026 It was my first real understanding of the sad part of the music industry, that so many people were signed and nothing happened to them. Most of the people that I got signed with, I don\u2019t think are even doing music anymore. Five years after moving to L.A., I found myself pretty far from my dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n As she explains, after being mentally and sexually abused as a teen by an older male mentor, and then down and out in L.A., \u201ca producer I was working with suggested it would be a good idea for me to make ends meet while living in L.A. I was given some random man\u2019s number, and he advised me to meet him down at the Denny\u2019s parking lot in K-Town. A man in a van full of other girls picked me up and we proceeded to go from bar to karaoke bar \u2026 lining up waiting for a man to eventually buy me for the night.\u201d<\/p>\n Article content<\/p>\n At her Vancouver performance, she sings this story in her hit song K-Town:<\/p>\n I ain\u2019t in that small town anymore In a rich, gravelly voice, Boutilier sings out her sorrows in a gorgeous alchemy that has turned pain into gold. As she does, her fans, most familiar with her story, mouth the lyrics and sway, lost in her story, perhaps contemplating their own.<\/p>\n Indeed, part of her appeal is that the 40-year-old singer makes people feel like it\u2019s never too late to be a rock star, and never too late to heal.<\/p>\n \u2018I\u2019m still working through the shame\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cK-Town is challenging for me to explain,\u201d she relates in her documentary video, \u201cbecause I\u2019m still working through the shame around this chapter of my life \u2026 I wrote this song as a bit of an anthem to myself to acknowledge the hard times without victimizing me.\u201d<\/p>\n Article content<\/p>\n In an interview with the National Post, she recalls her disenchantment with L.A. \u201cThis is the story of so many artists who get signed to major labels. There\u2019s a lot of excitement at the beginning, and then at some point, you know, they\u2019re not getting traction. And then maybe someone else gets signed to the label and comes out with an album.\u201d<\/p>\n In Boutilier\u2019s case, \u201csomeone\u201d was Lady Gaga. \u201cSuddenly,\u201d she relates, \u201cnow every single person at Interscope was focused on Lady Gaga because she was exploding into stardom.\u201d<\/p>\n As a young kid still \u201cfiguring out\u201d who she was and struggling with her creative direction, Boutilier got \u201clost in the shuffle,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n In a blender-like ordeal, she says she was paired with 50 producers in the space of a few years, churning out songs that the label was never satisfied with, then sending her back to the studio to record again in a vicious cycle.<\/p>\n \u201cI was just so naive,\u201d she says. \u201cI didn\u2019t realize that nobody was going to sit down with me and help me figure out what my direction was.\u201d<\/p>\n She recalls being told, at 22, that she was \u201ctoo old\u201d to make it in the business. In a Hollywood version of Pygmalion, she was told to take speech training to get rid of her \u201cuneducated\u201d accent.<\/p>\n Article content<\/p>\n Now, Boutilier speaks in a vaguely transatlantic drawl, with a bit of Nashville and faux ingenue thrown in for good measure. Like her many characters, it feels theatrical yet genuine, drawing deeply from her nine lives.<\/p>\n \u201cBut where I\u2019m at now is such a rebellion against all of those things,\u201d she tells the Post.<\/p>\n In the past, she says, she thought that she had to \u201cgloss over\u201d anything negative from her history, and that \u201cthe thing that was going to make me a great artist wasn\u2019t necessarily being honest. It was going to be being perfect and cookie-cutter.\u201d<\/p>\n It was the era of virginal Britney Spears clones and, Boutilier says, \u201cit was cemented in my mind that I had to be a good girl. It was a very confusing period to go through, just constantly feeling like who I was was not enough, and that I had to pretend to be so many things that I wasn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n When asked if now, at 40, she feels it was somehow a necessary learning process for her to go through all that, she replies, \u201cNo, I don\u2019t want to say it was necessary. I think a big part of my North Star now is I want to be honest about everything, so that hopefully some people can hear my story and skip some of those steps.\u201d<\/p>\n While in some ways the difficulties she faced have \u201cturned into my superpower,\u201d she says, \u201clooking back at that little girl, I wish I could have protected her.\u201d<\/p>\n Article content<\/p>\n Boutilier says that songwriting is part of her healing process, but beyond that, \u201cto hear people sing it back to me has empowered me so much,\u201d liberating her from the loneliness of her own experiences. Writing songs, she says, allowed her to give voice to experiences she couldn\u2019t easily talk about to friends and family.<\/p>\n There is a powerful sense of intimacy in that honesty. At the concert in Vancouver, you can feel it everywhere in the room, as fans sing along to songs they have memorized, in rapt musical communion with someone who is equal parts diva and old friend.<\/p>\n Certainly, Boutlier is not the first to write and sing songs about the evils of the music industry. There is a long and proud and very Canadian tradition of this, from Joni Mitchell\u2019s Free Man in Paris to Neil Young\u2019s This Note\u2019s for You. But she is perhaps the first to be so open about the personal trauma \u2014 and therein lies her appeal.<\/p>\n As a critic at Ladygunn Magazine wrote,<\/a> \u201cGoldie Boutilier is heartbreak\u2019s high priestess \u2026 channelling the spirit of Patsy Cline and the melancholia of Lana Del Ray.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Flamboyant and glamorous\u2019<\/p>\n It was Boutilier\u2019s move from L.A. to Paris in 2015, she says, that helped her find her voice, giving her the courage to express her story honestly through her songs.<\/p>\n Article content<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a magic in me going to a foreign land,\u201d she says of the place that proved ideal for self-discovery and creative reinvention.<\/p>\n She discovered that her early French immersion education wasn\u2019t a huge help in Paris, so she spent her first six months observing people in silence and watching body language. \u201cFrench people are all artists,\u201d she notes, and she soaked up the culture all around her.<\/p>\n![\"Goldie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/goldie-boutilier-cape-breton-canada-singer-songwriter-nashville-main-1.jpg\")
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE – AUGUST 24: Goldie Boutilier performs onstage at Orville Peck’s Sixth Annual Rodeo Night Two at Ascend Amphitheater on August 24, 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Mary-Beth Blankenship\/Getty Images) Photo by Mary-Beth Blankenship\/Getty ImagesArticle content<\/p>\n![\"National](\"https:\/\/dcs-static.gprod.postmedia.digital\/21.1.1\/websites\/images\/identity\/logo-identity-np-new.svg\"){kind=logo}
<\/p>\n![\"Canadian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/goldie-boutilier-cape-breton-canada-singer-songwriter-after-show.jpg\")
Canadian singer-songwriter Goldie Boutilier, after her performance at Vancouver\u2019s Hollywood Theatre on March 25, 2026. Photo by Hadani Ditmars\/National Post![\"Long](\"https:\/\/dcs-static.gprod.postmedia.digital\/21.1.1\/websites\/images\/newsletters\/icon-longStory.svg\"\/){kind=icon}
<\/p>\n![\"Canadian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/goldie-boutilier-cape-breton-canada-singer-songwriter-vancouver-main-2.jpg\")
\u201cThere was a magic in me going to a foreign land,\u201d Boutilier says of moving to Paris in 2015. Photo by Hadani Ditmars\/National Post<\/p>\n
They put down their swords
And wiped off the blood
And shook off the mud
And held onto each other
And cried for their mothers
Till all you could see
Were men on their knees
Cause all of the scenes
Are still haunting me
I need ketamine
For the PTSD<\/p>\n![\"Canadian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/goldie-boutilier-cape-breton-canada-singer-songwriter-vancouver-parasol.jpg\")
Boutilier, shown at her Vancouver show in March, channels different characters to tell her story with glam-rock drama. Her current incarnation is Goldie Montana, a Sharon Stone-Casino-inspired apparition \u201cwith the heart of a child and the mind of a sniper,\u201d she tells the National Post. Photo by Hadani Ditmars\/National Post<\/p>\n
Spillin\u2019 blood lines in the junkyard
But I know those parts are still a part of me
Can\u2019t catch me in K-Town anymore
Little tight dress in a karaoke bar
Almost brought me to my knees
They sold their bodies as I learned to sing
Now I know I\u2019m strong enough for anything
If I ain\u2019t got no-one, I still got me
\u2018Cause I\u2019ve been through a ring of fire
Been so lonesome I could die
I\u2019m the daughter of a coal miner\u2019s daughter
And if I had the chance, I know I\u2019d do it twice<\/p>\n![\"Canadian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/goldie-boutilier-cape-breton-canada-singer-songwriter-leopard.jpg\")
\u201cI\u2019ve always been an extrovert and a performer,\u201d Boutilier says. \u201cAnd you can see it in family photos. In every single photo, I was like, \u2018Tada!\u2019 doing these little jazz hands.\u201d Photo by Greg Swales<\/p>\n
![\"Goldie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/goldie-boutilier-cape-breton-canada-singer-songwriter-max-baby.jpg\")
Goldie Boutilier and Parisian musician Max Baby at his studio in Montmagny, outside Paris. Baby co-wrote, played all the instruments and produced Boutilier\u2019s Cowboy, Gangster, Politician, Emerald Year and the track Favorite Fear on Boutilier\u2019s debut LP. Photo by Friendsatwork.com<\/p>\n![\"Canadian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/goldie-boutilier-cape-breton-canada-singer-songwriter-blouse-3.jpg\")
\u201cThere\u2019s something about growing up on an island where manual labour was really what created the economy,\u201d says Boutilier, shown at her Vancouver show in March. \u201cIt\u2019s very different than growing up in a big city. Everyone\u2019s a character. Everyone has a story.\u201d Photo by Hadani Ditmars\/National Post<\/p>\n![\"Canadian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/goldie-boutilier-cape-breton-canada-singer-songwriter-stylist-gillard-2.jpg\")
Boutilier, with her childhood friend, Lindsay Gillard, who is now her stylist. Photo by Lindsay Gillard<\/p>\n![\"Canadian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/goldie-boutilier-cape-breton-canada-singer-songwriter-stylist-gillard-1.jpg\")
\u201cWe got together and drove around town singing songs and going through my closet and dressing up in all kinds of glam vintage clothes,\u201d says Gillard, of reconnecting with Boutilier in Cape Breton during the pandemic. \u201cIt felt like we were kids again.\u201d Photo by Lindsay Gillard<\/p>\n