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Buena Buya with Deadhorse & Clea Anais
Marquee Room
Thursday, November 5 - Thursday, November 5

More in: Rock / Pop

With acclaimed painter Dulcie Foo Fat for a mother, a father who teaches ballroom dancing and a sister who first attended The Juilliard School at age 15, art and music have long been the pillars of Clea Foofat’s life. However, while she picked up the cello at three, started playing piano two years later and has been playing in various bands since junior high, the multi-talented Calgarian still strived to avoid her fate.

“I tried really hard not to do music out of high school, but it just keeps coming back to me,” Foofat says with a laugh. “I’ve seen firsthand how being an artist is not necessarily a super stable or financially intelligent thing to pursue, so there’s always the toss-up between using your degree, finding a real job and saving up for a house or paying to get things recorded and then taking time off work.”

After completing her studies in communications at the University of Calgary on top of her diploma in film and television production from SAIT, Foofat jokes that she enrolled in “Band 101,” playing with The Consonant C, Thighs, Dojo Workhorse, Woodpigeon and her housemate Brock Geiger throughout the winter and spring of 2009. Now, she’s striking out solo under the name Clea Anaïs with the release of her debut chamber pop mini-album, Heartstrings.

“I wanted to do some solo stuff for a while, mostly just to document things that I’ve been playing,” Foofat explains. “I’ve done a lot of work with other people, so I thought it would be nice to do something for myself…. When you’re writing parts to go with other people’s work, it involves a different part of your brain than writing your own material. It’s great and scary because you have a lot more liberty.”

“I learned so much from [Dojo Workhorse’s] Danny Vacon in terms of having fun, performance and what brings a group of people together,” she continues. “Then, [Woodpigeon’s] Mark Hamilton taught me that you need to push your own project and have confidence. He booked me for Sled Island this summer to play my first solo show, and without that, I’m not sure if I would have even pursued it.”

Foofat’s family provided a central influence on the seven songs of Heartstrings as well, starting with the inclusion of her father’s voice on the French lullaby interlude “La Riviere Tanier” and expanding on a recent familial revelation.

“Last summer, I found out about a sister that I didn’t know I had previously, and met her and my niece for the first time this May,” Foofat says. “The song ‘Heartdrops’ was written after I met my sister for the first time, because it was kind of a crazy experience. I also had my dad record ‘La Riviere Tanier,’ a little song he used to sing to us as kids. Now he sings it to my niece, but I had kind of forgotten about it, so it’s super cool to be older and hear it again.”