Tania Joy's debut album 'I Will Stand' is out Friday, Sept 17 2021

By Will McGuirk

There’s the music industry cliche of the flaming meteor, but then there’s reality; a long slow burn, a process of hearing your own voice, listening for it, getting comfortable with it and then the speaking out, the singing out. Sometimes a song, an album is just exhaling after holding your breath for such a long, long, long time.

That’s Tania Joy, and her debut album, ‘I Will Stand’, produced by Hill Kourkoutis; Its an exhalation, a singular, individual, personal, yes joyous, exhalation, owning one’s own self, one’s own life and breathing out, being, voicing.

From the first song, “Who I Am”, on, with its brief electric guitar, POW!, power is amplified, and one wonders how did this take so long?

But it does, we know it does, and throughout the album there is song after song of voicing, and the enabling of the voices of others, and within the songs the hearing of voices absorbed; those of soul, folk, roots, gospel, blues, sweeping orchestral strings, the whole lifelong gathering is then exhaled.

“Planks and Mariettas”, an intersection in Uxbridge, ON., Joy’s hometown, calls out the small minds in small towns within the big picture of Black Lives Matter. Absorption, exhalation.

“Crosswalks and blindspots, your whisperings/ Your slurs and your curse words written in the streets”

And on the title track, absorption, exhalation.

“I will stand in the light and let go of the wrong and the right/ I will take a deep breath and I will take the next step in my life”

Its out today, “I Will Stand’. There’s a party at the Second Wedge Brewery in Uxbridge, on Friday Sep 17, today. Don’t even try, people were probably standing in line since Wednesday.

But if you get the chance to see Tania Joy live, do it, it will matter, it will make you different, she has that power, and that she has only recently, late in life, come to that knowledge, means there’s a whole lifetime of experience to draw from and a maturity to process it all through. Its good to keep in mind it can be worth the wait. For Tania Joy, and thus for us, it certainly has been.