Meghaan LeBlanc Unleashes Faun Stella Blending Roots and Chamber Pop With “The Isle & The Sea”
Meghaan LeBlanc lights up the misty shore with a new roots-infused chamber pop project as Faun Stella and its first single, “The Isle & The Sea.”
Canadian through and through, LeBlanc hails from Nova Scotia where she is embedded in the music scene as a singer, songwriter, and storyteller whose style is a blend of Celtic folk and roots-rock music. Her stage-sharing credits, under the alt-rock, alter ego Meghan Morrison, include plenty of notable Canadian artists such as Jim Cuddy (Blue Rodeo), Raine Maida (Our Lady Peace), and Chantal Kreviazuk (Moon vs Sun).
“The Isle & The Sea” is a soothing mix of LeBlanc’s ethereal vocals layered like waves across a summer-vibing beat and funky bass groove. The track was written and produced by Adam Faux, a doctoral student at York University, who played a pivotal role in creating the landscape of sound and movement that is present throughout the music.
It begins with a bell-like tonal guitar sequence before cracking open with its signature bass line. Almost immediately, LeBlanc’s ethereal vocals start weaving gently through a groovy background of sweet-clean guitars, popping bass, and bouncing drums. Like a cloud floating through a mountain range, LeBlanc’s vocals effortlessly navigate around the instruments with overlays of harmonies that appear and disappear, creating a full soundscape of angelic vocals right across the track.
The track was recorded at Faux’s home studio in Toronto (Lucy’s Studio – in memory of his fondest feline friend) with LeBlanc on vocal duties, Faux on bass, electric guitar, and programming, and Brent Welbourn adding additional guitars into the mix.
Its simple lyrics give away more meaning than might be caught at first listen, with LeBlanc citing an identity crisis (through a surprising family history search) as the main inspiration for the track. But she maintains that the spirit of the song applies to any aspect of identity where polarity is in question.
“Who do you want me to be?
Some wild child on an isle in the sea?
Who do you want me to be?
Some wild child on an isle in the sea?”
LeBlanc explains,
“What did it mean for my identity? I wasn’t raised in the culture and traditions, so I didn’t want to be disrespectful by claiming to be of this ethnicity. Was my DNA even ‘indigenous enough’ to count? Who decides how much ‘counts’? And who decides who has the decision rights over identity, to begin with? Where do I fit in? All kinds of questions like this started spinning through my head while trying to make sense of my new family history.”
“Adam was able to empathize because he is from a multi-ethnic family and is faced with conflicts of this nature almost every day. So we just dove into it, head on.”
Adam adds on the songwriting process,
“We are all born composers of sound, movement, and artifact. We intuitively communicate our physical, psychological, and most essential needs and desires through our bodies and voice.”
Watch the lyric video for “The Isle & The Sea” below and learn more about Meghaan via our mini-interview.
Care to introduce yourself?
Hi! My name is Meghaan LeBlanc and I am a singer-songwriter from Nova Scotia, Canada. I just launched a new chamber pop project called Faun Stella and am so happy to have been invited to talk about its first single with you. Thank you for the opportunity!
Tell us about the process of writing and recording “’The Isle & The Sea’?”
This was easily one of the most seamless writing and recording projects I’ve ever done.
Adam Faux (co-writer and co-producer) has such a warm and grounding presence, which enabled us to cut past a lot of the awkwardness I typically experience when working with someone for the first time. That sped up the process because we were able to get past the ‘noise’ and straight to the good stuff. His studio is truly a safe space too – free from judgment and totally open to any creative ideas.
Though the song and track were pieced together over a couple of years while I was bouncing between Toronto and Halifax, it only took a handful of sessions to complete. That is largely because Adam is a genius with arrangement and all the technical aspects of production. At the end of the first session, he played a musical idea that I instantly fell in love with (which ultimately became the intro and chorus). I played it continuously on the drive home and by the time I parked, the melody and first lines had practically written themselves. We were also totally locked in on what the song was about and how it should feel, so that definitely helped to facilitate the creative flow.
In the first session, we spent pretty much the whole time just talking (about what was going on in our lives and what was important to us). My dad had just tracked down his birth family, which led us to the discovery of our indigenous roots in Canada. While I was thrilled by this (for so many reasons), I also felt conflicted – because even though I had intuitively sensed it growing up, I wasn’t raised in the traditions and wasn’t sure where I fit into the culturescape.
You could say I was working through a bit of an identity crisis. Because even though I do fit neatly into many of society’s traditional ‘boxes’, I had never required myself to before and was suddenly feeling pressure to define my heritage in ways that would be socially acceptable to everyone (a process just as futile as trying to write a song everyone will like – haha).
Adam is from a multi-ethnic family too and is constantly met with these boxes. So we decided to just throw them out and embrace the space between! Polarity exists everywhere – you can’t have a spectrum without two poles to anchor it. That is just a fact of life (the beauty of green wouldn’t exist if blue and yellow didn’t, right?). Some people will land far to the right, others will land far to the left, and the rest innovate in between. Unfortunately, society doesn’t always value the beauty of the grey area as much as it does the extremes. So we wrote a song that does.
What’s it like being a musician in Nova Scotia?
I’ll have to get back to you on that one! Though I was born and raised here and music was very much a part of the fabric of my upbringing, I didn’t really become a ‘musician’ until I moved away for college. But fate has a funny way of working things out.
I landed in Nova Scotia for a visit three days before the lockdowns in 2020 and just ended up staying (haha). Which was perfect. It gave my family exactly the opportunity we needed to reconnect after many years apart. It also gave me a chance to stay put in one location long enough to get my bearings about me and restore my roots.
I have to say, even though I’ve only just started integrating with the local music scene, it has been such a warm and welcoming environment already with artists such as Jeff Gay (of Dirtmouth) inviting me to sing on his upcoming solo album and Mary Beth Carty (a fantastic folk artist I had never met before) offering to drive me home after the ECMAs to make sure I got there safely late at night. That’s Nova Scotia for you!
And Music Nova Scotia has been such an amazing support through this release too. I already felt blessed to receive one of their marketing grants for this single (courtesy of the government of Nova Scotia), but was blown away by how much they do to promote their artists and with such high-quality materials too. The Isle & The Sea got its first radio play because of them and I am so grateful to have been welcomed into this community.
Where does the mixing of pop and chamber music come into play? What did you get into first?
I guess this is one of those examples of me not requiring myself to fit into a particular ‘box’ (haha). Though I started publicly performing with my alt-rock alter ego ‘Meghan Morrison’, the more music I discovered while playing with such a diverse group of artists in Toronto (who all embraced their different musical roots), the more I appreciated the beauty of the music I had kind of forgotten about since childhood (which included folk, pop, and classical).
My mum was big into pop music (so I heard lots of that in the womb) and my dad was big into rock (so I heard lots of that in the car), but I was intrinsically drawn to classical all on my own. My mum loves telling the story of how I used to intuitively know, as a toddler, when the opera program was coming on. Like a homing pigeon, I would waddle over and turn on the tv to watch it on Sundays while she cleaned the house. So I guess I got into both around the same time!
I have to give credit to my junior high band teacher, Mr. (Jeff) Stern, too. He was the first person in my life to demonstrate through action that mixing musical genres is okay. He let me play oboe in the jazz band and took us to compete in the Kiwanis Festival (which I’m pretty sure we were disqualified from because we didn’t fit into their ‘box’ of instrument requirements – he probably just didn’t tell them that when registering). Such a rebel! What a great influence. Love that guy.
I’m far from a classical or jazz musician though! And I’m not the first artist to dance in the world of chamber pop either. Feist, Florence and the Machine, and the Beach Boys are some names you might know in this space.
You’ve been making music for a while now, what’s one piece of advice you can offer to those starting out?
Get clear on ‘why’ you are making music and let that be your guide.
If you are writing for yourself and purely for the joy of it, that’s beautiful! Let loose and don’t hold back (the rules don’t have to apply unless you want them to, and it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes your song – so don’t let anyone’s opinion get in your way).
If you are writing with or for other people, you’ll need a more conscientious and inclusive writing practice. Like any other social activity, when you commit to something broader than your own whims and desires, how you show up for others in that process will either limit or expand what is possible for everyone in the collaboration. The sooner you get good at that (which can sometimes be harder than learning the technical skills of music), the faster others will want to work with you, and the more you can achieve together. Everybody wins.