Arts & Culture

Shad on Twenty Years Strong in The Game

Start Anew, the seventh record from Shad, began with the rapper thinking about endings.

“I was looking at the world and thinking that so much tension has to do with how difficult it is to let go,” says Shad, the Juno and Emmy award-winning musician who fluctuates between music, documentaries, teaching and rapping, where he’s been nominated five-times for Canada’s prestigious Polaris Music Prize. “It’s hard to go through change. We end up kicking and screaming against that, but you have to get to your bottom in order to move past things and I felt like now was a good time to make a record about what we’re all going through as a collective.”

With his patented, dexterous, rhythmic rhyme flow—few MCs make you reach for the rewind button like Shad—the musician says that after two decades of playing shows and dropping albums, he took time to think about his legacy. In the face of the MAGA movement and climate crises, wars in Sudan, Ukraine and the Middle East, let alone income inequality and social injustice here at home, it feels like the world’s at a tipping point. On Start Anew, Shad stares down a career that began in 2005 and wonders what he has left to share with the culture.

“Am I going to be that older artist that’s always angry and fighting for his place in the story or am I going to be the guy who stays inspired, contributes and lets life be whatever it is?” he asks, and talks about the inspiration for thoughtful, fire new tracks like Slanted, Bars and Barbecues, Islands and K.I.S.S. “Endings are hard. Evolving is hard. But I think we have the courage collectively to do it, which is how I stay inspired to write and perform.”

The performance aspect of the Shad live show—where his breath control on such wordy classics like Rose Garden and Keep Shining is a site to behold—is a singular experience. He imbues his audience with not only beats, rhymes and life, but also with positive messaging and a shared emotional ride. This tour, which touches down from Vancouver to Toronto, Edmonton to Guelph, is designed to be extra celebratory. Reflecting back on twenty years, Shad says he wants to salute his fans at each stop of his live show.

“I’m trying to keep ticket prices low and taking requests, not only for songs, but also with banter,” he says, using his newsletter to ask his audience not only what they want to hear him play, but what they want to hear him talk about. “I want this album release and tour to be a celebration of the bond I’ve had with my listeners and celebrate this special relationship we’ve been lucky enough to share.”

Far from becoming the curmudgeonly old rapper that he warns about, Shad has remained youthful and witty, using humour and nonchalance amongst his messages and remaining, twenty years down the road, at the very top of the game. He says his music has always navigated that balance between heavy and light, stark, and optimistic about what’s yet to come.

“I come around music because of the positive emotions attached to it, the joy—that’s how I got into hip hop, the fun of freestyling with friends,” he says. “That’s why I rap, because of those euphoric experiences, but I’m also using music to represent the tension and paradoxes that are life. You can’t grow without discomfort, but you also need some levity, vulnerability and silliness—music is all those things, and that’s what I try to encompass on my albums and tour.”