Lou-Adriane Cassidy on pushing past self-doubt to win ADISQ songwriter award

Lou-Adriane Cassidy has made a career of proving herself wrong. At the recent ADISQ Gala, the Montreal singer-songwriter won the Félix for songwriter of the year alongside collaborator and partner Alexandre Martel — but a decade ago she didn't believe she had what it took to write songs at all.

"It's become a thread through my life and career," Cassidy said during a recent interview. "Me thinking I'm not capable, then forcing myself, and realizing I actually am."

The pattern began in 2017 when Cassidy wanted to join Destination Chanson Fleuve, a touring project that required three original songs. She only had two — gifts from Philémon Cimon and the Sœurs Boulay — so she wrote "Respiration" out of necessity. "I forced myself because I wanted to live that," she said.

That willingness to tackle the impossible became her signature. When writing "Journal d'un loup-garou," the title track of an album that became the opposite of the disaster she feared, Cassidy set out to make fun something she hated: jazz fusion and blues. "It doesn't make sense," she laughed, aware of the audacity. "But when I was younger, I was against reverb and blues guitar solos. This song is me trying to make something I trip on by taking elements that repel me."

The album succeeded precisely because Cassidy wasn't afraid to expose her fragility. She dug into the scars of adolescence, risking looking uncool or earnest when earnestness itself fell out of favor. For years, Quebec music celebrated artists who seemed indifferent — the ones in plain t-shirts who appeared to have written their songs by accident. Cassidy's work is a deliberate reaction: it's ambitious, it reaches for the sky, and she's not apologizing for wanting to be good at what she does.

At 29, Cassidy still finds her fullest self on stage, the place where she seems to transfigure entirely under the lights. And if her path keeps asking her to do the thing she thinks she can't, she's learned the answer is almost always yes.