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It’s understandable if fans of Calgary hip-hop are a bit confused by the notion that Tea Fannie has just released her debut album.
It is perhaps not technically true. It’s All Love, which came out last month, follows several releases from the artist who has packed a bewildering amount of work and achievements into the past five years.
In terms of recordings, that includes two fiercely DIY solo offerings in 2020, Tea Time and Hello!, and a four-song live EP recorded at Calgary’s Palomino Smokehouse. She released Most Hated in 2021, an acclaimed EP with R&B Miss Benzo. After earning a coveted spot opening for New York rapper Princess Nokia in 2022 at Sled Island, Fannie blasted out the two-song EP Don’t Box Me as a thank-you to fans and the festival.
It’s All Love is an eclectic and assured 13-track outing that finds the genre-fluid artist breaking new ground with soulful grooves and inventive beats. Fannie is promoting it as her debut or, at the very least, her “first professional piece of work.”
The album took four years to produce, with Fannie collaborating with producers Junia-T and Only1KNG, among others.
“It all happened organically,” she says. “I met Junia-T a few years ago and every time I went to Toronto we would just hop in the studio and cook up something just for the fun of it and to see where it goes. So I thought, maybe I’ll apply for a grant and maybe we can put out a three or four-song EP. Obviously, the grants take awhile and we finally got approved last year and we had about 11 or 12 songs.”
Fannie and Junia-T tried their best to whittle down the collection for an EP, but it didn’t work. Finally, the producer told Fannie they should just stretch the funding and make a full-blown album.
“We stretched the hell out of it,” she says with a laugh.
The budget may have been spread thin, but the sound certainly isn’t. She used an army of collaborators which included Catfish the Wizard, Ice That One, Della Kit, Lowkita and Grammy-nominated Toronto rapper LordQuest. The tracks mix infectious beats and Fannie’s witty wordplay with live instrumentation. That includes some trippy, muted trumpet and piano on the jazzy Sober Thoughts, which seems to detail Fannie’s relationship with smoking weed. BBBO mixes playful beats and keyboard flourishes with swirling overlapping melodies and rhymes.
One of the more unique collaborators on the album appears on the most recent single, Rap Again, which starts as a decidedly political number in the first verse before morphing into more of a love song to fit the overall theme of the record. Snippets of a speech about racism by Janis Irwin, the NDP MLA for Edmonton-Highlands-Norwood, appear at the beginning of the tune before Fannie opens with a verse inspired by possible graves discovered outside of residential schools.
“We became friends over the last couple of years,” Fannie says. “Because of her passion seeing her in (legislature) and stuff, it’s horrible to say this, but it was the first time I voted since I was 18. She piqued my interest back into politics. I just asked her if it was OK to use one of her speeches in a song. She had no problem with it. I let her hear it while we were recording it, the raw version, and she was still feeling it. I gave her the final version and she said ‘Yeah, just let me know when to post it and I’ll share it.’”
On the liner notes for It’s All Love, Fannie says Irwin gives her hope about politics and also writes that “this girl works harder than me, that’s rare for me to see, not gonna lie.” If the artist’s prodigious output as a recording artist before releasing her professional debut isn’t evidence enough of her work ethic, Fannie’s dedication to live performance should be. It’s hard to believe that before 2019, she had never set foot on a stage. While she had written poetry as a child, she was always too shy to recite it publicly. But five years ago, a friend wouldn’t take no for an answer when he demanded she open up for him at an Edmonton club.
“It’s funny, it remember it felt like my legs were trembling visibly,” she says. “Everything was jiggling and the mic was shaking in my hand to a point where I thought people couldn’t hear me properly and I was missing words. I was trembling, shaking, I was sweating in every way, I thought I was going to throw up. But I watched the tape back and none of that was visible.”
Despite the auspicious debut, Fannie strived to improve with each show and soaked up tips and advice from her friends in the community.
“I take criticism really well,” she says. She was eventually enlisted for high-profile slots not only at Sled Island but also at the Calgary Folk Music Festival and Folk on the Rocks in Yellowknife.
Born in Victoria, Fannie was raised mostly in Edmonton. But she was also an army brat who moved around and has, over the years, lived in nine cities in four provinces. It was a nice primer for the life of a travelling musician. She plans to hit the road with It’s All Love soon but will hold a Calgary release show on Oct. 12 at Prairie Emporium.
“All I want to do right now is go couch-surfing on a tour,” she says. “It’s a lot easier for me to do something like that, to be away from family and friends for months at a time. It’s almost like everything in my life has prepped me for music. ”
Tea Fannie will play the Prairie Emporium on Oct. 12.