By Brittany Tiplady
@yellowbird888

As a young journalist, navigating the ropes of this turbulent industry, I’m still met with stories and interviews that challenge me; the ones that crack me open and demand better writing, better research, and deeper questions. On a Sunday afternoon at the end of February, I had the pleasure of interviewing fellow journalist and author Andrea Warner. Lauded as one of Vancouver’s most cherished music writers, one can argue that Warner’s notable work serves as form of cultural currency for all things pop culture, feminism, and of course, Canadian. She’s a freelance journalist, an associate producer at CBC Music, an author, and the co-host of Pop This! a pop culture and feminism podcast alongside CBC’s Lisa Christiansen.

Born and raised in Vancouver, Warner’s foray into freelance writing was much like my own: steadfast and eager. At 27 years old she started writing film reviews for The Westender, and oddly, the Charleston City Paper in South Carolina (but that’s another story), and quickly graduating to larger, meatier, culture-focused features in publications like Exclaim!, the Georgia Straight, and Pitchfork.

Warner arrived at the Loose Lips office right on time, and as I let her into the building my pulse quickened. I made small talk in the elevator, thanking her for braving Vancouver’s relentless snowmaggedon to spend the afternoon with me. “Cute!” she exclaimed, as I led the way into our 190 square-foot studio. It was my first time interviewing another journalist, and in preparation I had spent the better part of February re-reading her 2015 debut book We Oughta Know: an insightful, emotional, and honest look at Shania, Celine, Alanis and Sarah—four pioneer women in the Canadian music industry.

Feist was playing at a gentle volume as I fiddled with the crystals in my pocket (Obsidian Arrowhead to ward off negativity, and build ease against self-doubt, Aquamarine for courage and confidence, Rose Quartz for good measure). And so we began, plunging into the details of Warner’s colourful career: exploring her inspiration for writing We Oughta Know, the details of her forthcoming book Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography, utopian feminism, and writing horoscopes for Soap Opera Weekly in her early 20s.

What made you decide to write We Oughta Know? 

Music journalism, up until the last 10 to 15 years, has been so predominately centred around male artists, and women have always been “othered” and identified as a ‘female’ musician. I’ve always noticed that, and particularly when you start exploring Canadian music history  there’s a lot information about dudes and very little about women. It’s always frustrated me, and I’ve attempted to do what I can to correct that history and fill-in a lot of purposely blank spots. I’ve seen what I can bring to the table as a person that can provide that history of Canadian music, which is told through all of the incredible women-artists that have contributed to it.

Even as part of that, I’ve really examined what it means to be Canadian, and the colonization of the music industry and all of those things and how exclusionary it’s been to our Indigenous creators. So, there’s a lot of different ways that the Canadian Music industry has been upheld by those [elements] of white supremacy and the patriarchy.

All of that is why I want to fuckin’ take it all down.

When was the right time for you to start unpacking this book?

I don’t know if there was any kind of strategy at all. I knew I wanted to write books and I knew that I wanted to be a writer since I was kid and the longer that I made a living from my writing, which was a huge step, it became a more mercenary thing. I’ve been so lucky that for the most part, I’ve have the privilege of really only writing about topics that I care about. I understand very much the privilege of that. When I was started working for the CBC, that’s when I started to really unpack those Canadian aspects. In team meetings, I was always one of the only [writers] who would suggest woman artists, and the more that I started to do that the more information I was personally finding. That’s when I came across a Wikipedia article that was listing the best-selling artists in Canada in the history of record sales, and I noticed it was Celine, Shania, Alanis, and Sarah [the four artists explored in my book] and I was just like immediately zapped back [to my teens].

I wanted to write an article on this for a long time, and it seemed big. It was a cool fact, but this topic seemed particularly centred around me, and my feminism, and my relationship to those four artists.

So, after reading this fun Canadian fact, and knowing you had the chops to write this kind of book, when did the writing start? 

Out of the clear blue, around 2014, I got an email from the people at Eternal Cavalier Press, and they said ‘Hey, we’re publishing music books, written by music critics in Canada specific to Canadian content, we love your writing, do you have any ideas?’ So I turned the book around in about a year, which is kind of crazy!

I’ve always wanted to do more—documentaries, books, podcasts. Music is so personal. Obviously, when you love it or when you hate there, there’s this visceral, hormonal, thing that goes on in your brain and body. The ubiquity means that we couldn’t escape that music.

Do you think that because music is so saturated with options now, that we don’t all share the same memory with music like we did in the 90’s and before?

Obviously then, there was way fewer options in terms of radio and that self-curation model, but we were already seeing mix-tapes back then, and people were starting to burn CDS—so yeah self-curation can definitely broaden things. 

Today, even if you don’t listen to Adele’s music, you can identify her music. Even just from hearing it in the grocery store—which is frankly due to a lack of good copy writing, but we have music always as a background to whatever we are doing. And that’s why we continue to have a shared experience, most of the time, in aisle three, in front of the tampons.

I love your quote from We Oughta Know “feminism for me, was always the answer.” How does that still ring true for you in your career today and how is that sentiment still in your work today?

I still see more and more the limitations of white feminism and our responsibilities. For me in particular, as I identify as a cis-gendered straight white woman, I see very clearly how white feminism has been very exclusionary.

The term intersectional feminism doesn’t really belong to me. It comes from black women academics, but I’m trying to be much more aware that feminism has always been the answer for me because it has, to a certain extent, been a part of my liberation as a white woman. We have to specify an element of whiteness, because it’s important—so much of institutionalized power has been because of skin colour.

Feminism has not always been the answer for everybody else, only because so often it was couched in these very specific terms. But I think it can be the answer, if we really explicitly unpack what it means to be a feminist who believes that their liberation is tied directly to freedom from capitalist endeavours, eliminating violence from racialized bodies. A huge part of that is every woman having access to proper health care and abortion, it’s about trans inclusivity; I see so many areas in which it’s very easy assume that feminism just looks like me. Also, radical size acceptance.

Feminism can, and always will be answer for me, but i’m just trying to broaden my definition and open up feminism to include so much more awareness.

Let’s talk about your awesome podcast, Pop This! Which, by the way, I’m dying to be a guest on.

So, we’ve been doing Pop This! for a little over two years now. We have weekly discussions on feminism and pop culture. We’ve  explored everything from Gilmore Girls to #Oscarssowhite to the Florida Project. We fight a lot—Lisa and I have an annual fight. So far, every Christmas we fight about Love, Actually versus the Holiday. We use pop culture as a lens to talk about bigger social issues!

I’m going veer slightly off topic because I must know: are you a Sex and the City fan? What do you think about it from a feminist lens now?

Movie number two was like…’wow I am not a Sex and the City fan anymore.’ It’s racist and homophobic and it does no one any favours. That said, there’s still elements of the show that I love a lot and the in first movie there’s elements that I also kind of love a lot. I’m always of the mindset, that when they do these types of movies, I’m always going to show up and see how my old friends are doing. And I may not like my old friends anymore, and I may not agree with my old friends anymore, but I’m still going to check up on them.

Let’s talk about your next book, when can we read it?

It’s due to release in September, so soon! It’s the authorized Biography of Buffy Sainte- Marie [detailing her life] from her birth to her current age. She just turned 77 last week, probably, no one actually knows the year she was born. I’ve been working on this book for a year and a half. When it’s released it will be a month under two years from when I pitched [the topic.] It’s all been really fast!

Did you spend lots of time with her?

Oh yeah! I met her in New York and I went on tour with her for a couple days’ I just climbed in to the van and was with her for like 3 days. When she was in the West Coast, I toured with her and we talked on the phone twice a week for seven weeks, and more emails and texts as we needed to throughout.

Okay, I did my research and read that you used to write horoscopes for Soap Opera Weekly and now I must know how that happened. 

I did the two year journalism program at Langara, and during my summer break I went to New York and worked at Soap Opera Weekly. Again, very lucky! I got to go New York and live for about four months and I spent most of the summer transcribing other people’s interviews. But one of the only good things about transcribing other people’s work for five months for free, because there’s not a lot other good things about it, is that you learn interview techniques. You’re eaves dropping on how they interact with people, different approaches, and so on. I got to write a few pieces of my own while I was there, and I got paid for them which was cool.

I went back [to New York] the next year to visit the friends that I had made the summer before, and I brought my little tiny tarot deck—everyone always wanted me to do their tarot card—-and I was talking to the Editor [of Soap Opera Weekly] and she asked if I wanted to do weekly horoscopes. Of course I was like ‘sure! I can totally do horoscopes with my tarot cards.’ So, I became the horoscope columnist for Soap Opera Weekly for two or three years.

This is my new favourite question to ask women: what’s your ideal feminist utopia? Like for me, in a really basic level, my own personal feminist utopia would include never having to wear a bra again, or, I guess, feeling like I had to. 

To me, a feminist utopia would look like everyone having the same access to shelter, to a basic income level. And a basic income level is where we start to look at how disparity starts to impact feminism in the veins of childcare, emotional labour—there’s so many costs to being a woman and identifying as a woman. A feminist utopia for me, is also a place where there is no such thing as gender violence and frankly, where conflict is non-existent. The profiteering of war, the money institution of war. I would also love to see us move towards a non-incarceration model. Really thinking broadly about the ways in which all of society would and can benefit from a feminist utopia.

Who are your favourite Canadian musicians at the moment?

Buffy, is of course, my favourite. She’s definitely my be all and end all. I think there are so many Canadian women who we don’t know about yet, and I’m trying really hard to kind of unearth some of those stories; maybe we’ve been sold the wrong story about them, or they’ve become a kind of cultural joke and that’s not the legacy that they deserve. Indigenous radio has been around for decades on reserves across the country that settler Canada knows nothing about, featuring artists that settler Canada has never heard of. There’s a lot of unknown stories that are about to come out in the next five to ten years that I’m really excited about.

Would you say you’re on a serious mission to give life to these unknown stories?

Oh, yes. I’m always looking for the secret and or forgotten histories, specifically yes, of women in Canada, but more broadly, artists of colour, Indigenous artists, trans artists. None of these are my stories to tell, and I don’t want to be claiming that at all, but I’d like to be providing a platform for these artists to be able to tell their stories openly.

Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography will be released on September 25, 2018 and is now available for pre-order here. You can keep up with Andrea’s work via her website, and by plugging into Pop This! every week. 

Brittany Tiplady is a writer, editor, ballet teacher, and the co-founder of Loose Lips Magazine. She loves the indoors, fast wifi, collecting maps, and a generous glass of red wine. She’s a self-proclaimed wizard of time management and a notorious loud talker with a penchant for all things Internet and pop culture.