Song will be on Canadian contemporary folk artist’s forthcoming album A Call From Somewhere Else
After sharing a handful of singles over the past several years, Canadian singer/songwriter Drea Lake is preparing to show off her full range on a debut full-length album, A Call From Somewhere Else, set for release in autumn 2025. Today, she offers the first preview, “4U,” a song that displays Drea’s distinctive approach to her craft, mixing unconventional arrangements with instantly memorable hooks, all held together with her soaring vocals.
“‘4U’ is really an anthem for love, commitment and the sense of freedom that goes along with living in the country,” Drea says. “It’s the song on the album that I most hope people will bounce to. Olivia Esther also added something special to it with her French horn and Nicholas Baddely added some wonderful train-style beats. It’s just one example of the care that we put into this song overall.”
That care certainly extends to the rest of Drea’s new material, co-produced and featuring the renowned Quebecois acoustic guitarist Antoine Dufour, along with a host of other contributors drawn from the worlds of Canadian roots, jazz, and classical music. Blending genres has always been a major focus of Drea’s compositional style, and she came to the album sessions with about 20 songs she felt had the most potential for collaboration. These were eventually whittled down to the final eight songs, which she describes as coming together “without any loose ends. I can’t take them any further, at least for now, and that’s when you need to share them with others.”
Drea maintains that her primary inspiration is her connection to nature, something she experiences through splitting her time between rural southern Ontario and areas surrounding Montreal. “The moods of the songs on this album range from joyous elation, to more quiet, almost soothing, forms of joy, to dreaminess, a sense of mystery and caution, to heartbreak and reflective regret. In most songs, there are lessons we learn from the natural world, such as different forms of love, friendship, spirituality, and musical camaraderie. Under all of those themes lies nature.”
Although Drea self-effacingly describes herself as a “perennial beginner” in terms of her musical evolution, the focus she has put into her craft has set her apart from some of her contemporaries within the folk music field, despite her slim discography to date. But that’s all about to change with her upcoming album, which for all intents and purposes will be her formal introduction to the wider music world.