Canadian singer-songwriter Gabrielle Papillon experienced music for the first time before she was even born, nestled safely in her mother’s womb as her parents attended a Grateful Dead concert. She wrote her first songs at fourteen after learning to play basic chords on the guitar before forming several bands with her brother throughout high school.
Gabrielle began touring full time in June of 2010 and has since been touring almost non-stop across Canada. Her new album The Currency of Poetry (released October 11th, 2011) began charting in the top 10 Folk/Roots/Blues and Top 30 charts for several college stations across the country prior to it’s official release date and landed in the Top 20 National Earshot charts for the month of October 2011. Her music has also found its way onto local and regional CBC airwaves.
Her latest release, The Currency of Poetry, was recorded at Montreal’s Treatment Room (Plants and Animals, The Acorn, Timber Timbre, Stars, Snailhouse) with help from Montreal members of her backing band The Mighty Oak. She is plotting a return to the studio to record her fourth and most ambitious project in 2012. With most of the tracks already written Gabrielle has recruited a group of talented and noteable musicians from both her hometowns (in Halifax and Montreal) and will be recording in both cities, and doing the final mixing and mastering in Halifax.
Gabrielle has played at The Black Sheep Inn (Wakefield), The Ironwood Stage (Calgary), Communitea (Canmore), Haven Social Club (Edmonton), Company House (Halifax), Baba’s Lounge (Charlottetown), Lydia's Pub (Saskatoon), The Media Club and the Railway Club (Vancouver), Divan Orange and Casa Del Popolo (Montreal), and the Living Room (New York City).
She has had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Amelia Curran, Royal Wood, Roxanne Potvin, Kite Hill, Del Barber, and Olenka and the Autumn Lovers.
She has showcased at OCFF, Halifax POP Explosion, and the 2011 International Folk Alliance Conference in Memphis (with official showcases at the latter two conferences). She also performed at the In the Dead of Winter Festival in 2010 and 2011, and headlined at the All Folk’d Up Festival in Montmartre Saskatchewan in 2011 and was a finalist in the Open Category for Ottawa Folk Festival’s One Fret Less Award in 2010.
"Papillon’s acoustic delivery is the sort that will stay with you, kicking around in your head long after each track ends. Her voice has the ability to saturate your audio intake in a personal way, whilst maintaining the tempo necessary to keep your feet tapping. She has a way of articulating that gives life to the edges of those letters most people skip over."
Josh Doyle, The Ontarion
"Gabrielle Papillon's voice is a major key haunt, a moment to bask in sadness, then move into the light."
Jon Thompson, The Kenora Daily Miner
On The Currency of Poetry:
“Every track is intimate, catchy yet shockingly beautiful. Definitely inspired by 60′s folk, every track sounds drenched in mysterious melancholy that gives them weight and power – you want to discover the message and it makes for an intriguing listen.”
Jason Gladu, Stage Door Music Reviews
“A slight nod to pop sensibility, and a keen sense of harmony, go a long way for [Papillon]. Songs like "Paddle and Row" and "Dust To Gold" prove that you don't need a lot of instrumentation to add a memorable hook to your song… The vocals on the album are strong as well. Papillon's lyrics come through crystal clear. It's not a powerful voice, but it is incredibly well-matched for her musical style. The standout vocal performance comes in the touching "One Small Frame", a track on which Papillon sounds almost Feist-like.”
T.O. Snobs Music
“She's a new kind of folk performer, almost a hybrid, a bit of an indie rock kid as well. She certainly has no trouble with the basic acoustic guitar-voice performance, and on disc, she expands on that, with lots of harmonies and doubled vocals, plus more strings, a bit of percussion and keyboards but usually not a whole lot of any of it. The words stand out for sure, and she has some striking originals… There's some seriously talented storytelling going on there, and some Texas guitarslingers would no doubt love to claim this one (Outlaws and Criminals) as their own.”
Bob Mersereau, CBC Radio