Billianne has locked down spots on the bills of major festivals like Osheaga, the Great Escape and SXSW.Nadia Doss/Supplied
Opening for gospel legend Mavis Staples in Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre earlier this summer, singer-songwriter Billianne talked onstage about her parents, her background and No Wonder, the first song she ever wrote. If she was chatty onstage, it was not out of nervousness.
“When I’m the opening act, I try to show a little more personality,” she said later. “I say my name more. You have to tell them, because my name’s not on the ticket. Basically, I want the audience to understand who I am and where I’m coming from.”
She is 22-year-old Billianne Lowry, from Milton, Ont. Her poignant, unplugged cover of the Tina Turner hit Simply the Best went viral in 2021. Since then, she and her team have worked to both capitalize on the online hit and distance the artist from it.
The idea is to connect music fans with Billianne the person, not as a TikTok personality earning “likes” on social-media feeds. Her performance of the folk-pop single Daydream on NBC’s Today a year ago is the type of high-profile appearance that keeps her career momentum moving along.
“We’re talking about an artist who has lived online for so many years,” said co-manager Michael Sayegh, owner of the Montreal-based agency Lighter Than Air. “Getting people something they can hold onto, in a live show or in a record-store signing, remains the priority in the next stage of her career. We’re taking Billianne out of the internet.”
What fans are connecting to is a young woman with sonorous pipes and a sincere appearance. Her debut full-length album, out Aug. 15, is Modes of Transportation, a reference to an ingenue in motion and a young artist who had never set foot on an airplane before she began touring.
The album’s advance single, Crush, is a lovestruck pop tune that broke Billianne on Canadian radio. A sense of starry-eyed wonder permeates her material, whether on covers Simply the Best (“Give me a lifetime of promises and a world of dreams”), the follow-up Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) or on her own Daydream and No Wonder.
On the latter, she references a Tragically Hip lyric and ponders the future: “Like wheat kings, pretty things, I’ll never know what tomorrow brings, but I’m ready.”
Record label blues
After Simply the Best blew up, Billianne was inundated with e-mails from managers and labels. Still a teenager, with zero experience in the music business, she picked the first offer she received. “I was trying to be fair,” she said in a video-conference interview from her bedroom in her parents’ home. “I was 19 and I was just trying to figure it all out.”
The label she chose was the Los Angeles-based Selene, owned by Avex in Japan. The Selene team wanted Billianne to continue with cover tunes. She wanted to record original material, however, even though she had little songwriting experience.
“I was writing, but I was bad at finishing them,” she said.
She then teamed up with songwriter-producers Nick Ferraro and Duncan Hood, which led her to Lighter Than Air. Sayegh signed Billianne after meeting with her parents: “Three eggs and ham at a local diner,” he said.
The first order of business getting Billianne out of her record deal with Selene.
Though Billianne’s debut EP The Things We Talk About in 2023 was released on Selene, her coming Modes of Transportation will be released independently through the U.S.-based media-distribution company the Orchard, a division of Sony Music Entertainment.
“I wanted more say in what I was doing,” Billianne said. “Signing with a label at some point would be nice, but I’ll cross that path when I get there.”
Ontario-born Billianne went viral on TikTok in 2021 for her cover of Tina Turner’s Simply the Best.Nadia Doss/Supplied
Publicity, touring and Taylor Swift’s endorsement
Working with Toronto booking agency Paquin Entertainment Group, Billianne’s managers put her on the road in Canada, the United States and abroad headlining her own shows and opening for bigger acts such as Tim Baker and the Australian folk duo Hollow Coves. She also locked down spots on the bills of major festivals Osheaga, the Great Escape and SXSW.
At SXSW in Austin, Tex., Billianne caught the attention of Rolling Stone magazine’s deputy music editor Simon Vozick-Levinson. About her performance at the High Noon bar and patio, he wrote that Billianne “sounded a little like a young Adele, singing pop songs about love and frustration with a twinge of neo-soul in her phrasing.”
Publicists quickly turned “sounded a little like a young Adele” into a “Canada’s Adele” angle. Another boost was Billianne’s online cover of Taylor Swift’s Labyrinth, which earned Swift’s endorsement on Instagram.
“It had an immediate impact,” Billianne said of the Tay Tay seal of approval. “Her followers were excited about me because Taylor Swift was excited.”
Getting Billianne on Today was a fluke − anchor Savannah Guthrie is a fan. In early July, Billianne sang Crush on CBS Saturday Morning. Her team received one day’s notice for the taping.
“Things,” said co-manager Eric Haynes, “happen fast.”
What’s next
Though Billianne benefited from lucky breaks, what has made it all possible is her voice. “The power of that is what the music industry exists for,” said Juno-winning singer-songwriter Donovan Woods. “What she has is the actual hard currency of popular music. The rest of us are just varying degrees of hangers-on.”
Billianne’s immediate future after the release of Modes of Transportation is a headlining tour this fall with dates in major markets Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, London, Manchester, Glasgow, Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto (Dec. 9, at the Great Hall).
“I’m learning what it takes to make a career and what makes an artist,” Billianne said. “There are expectations from everyone around me, and I have my own expectations. It can be stressful.”
While on tour earlier this year opening for Woods, a song of hers played on the radio in a Tim Hortons in Saskatchewan. “She heard herself and smiled a tiny smile,” Woods said. “When you can sing like that, you get to decide how famous you’d like to be. It will be interesting to see what she picks.”