Some artists deliver courier packages, do telemarketing or paint houses to bring in some cash so they can fuel their real passion, music. Toronto’s Bossie is working on a TV show called Does It Fart?
The 29-year-old musician, whose real name is Anne Douris, is a talented props and set designer. In the video for her ’80s-styled pop concoction “Strawberry Moon,” from her full-length debut, Not Pictured (out on Culvert Music), she is singing in a hot pink bedroom surrounded by giant lipsticks, eye shadow palette and a diet soda pop can. She made those. They’re on the album cover too and she carts as many as will fit in her vehicle to use onstage for her live shows (and gets a couple of male friends to wear lipstick “heads” and dance).
It’s been a few years since Bossie’s song “Meteor” was discovered on Bandcamp under the name Token by London’s DIY mag, which led to a moniker change, a re-recording, and more exposure from such noted music bibles as NME, Stereogum and Noisey. As Bossie, Douris — who started creating her own music while her bandmates in Stella Ella Ola and Hollerado (she was a sometime member) were busy touring — released a few more singles, “Tell It All,” “There Will Be Time” and “A Lot Like Love,” but then something happened: pressure, creative paralysis, depression.
And so it just took a bit of time before she finished Not Pictured, which contains the aforementioned four songs (some rerecorded or remixed or remastered), plus five more, co-written with Nixon Boyd, and produced by Douris, Boyd and Mike Rocha,”with help from” Nyles Miszczyk, J.M. Ladd and Aidan Vickery. Douris sings, plays guitar and synthesizer, and Boyd also added vocals, guitar and synth, plus bass. Nick Greaves plays some bass and Sam Sholdice drums.
But Bossie is Douris or Douris is Bossie. She has now embraced the name, but not the persona she initially created, which she tells Billboard “bit me in the ass later on because I was completely not invested.”
Douris sat down with Billboard at Toronto’s ’50s-styled malt shop, Bean & Baker — because there doesn’t seem to be an ’80s-themed restaurant in the city — for this very open conversation.
Billboard: Congrats, you finally got your album out
Bossie: Thank you. Yes, long time coming, it’s so crazy how you have to wait so long after finishing.
Did your “day job” get in the way?
I contract, so it’s always different, but making a record costs money so you have to pay for it and so I had to work the whole time, which makes it slower but I do like my other work so at least it’s not a grind.
Your other work is video and film?
I’m working right now on a kid’s show. I’m a production designer so I’m building sets and making props. I do the same thing on other productions, sometimes corporate, sometimes music videos.
What’s the kid’s show?
It’s not announced yet but it’s called Does It Fart? It’s a science show about animals and how they fart. So I’m building a big science lab. I love the kids TV production world. Everyone is so nice and open-minded. It’s not the same kind of preciousness of serious narrative film.
I guess your album cover, where you’re surrounded by giant lipsticks, you built those?
Yes, they’re to scale. They’re three feet tall. My apartment looks like the inside of a teenager’s purse. It’s just full of all these crazy large make-up products. I build all that stuff. When we started the band, the idea was that it was going to be musical and visual. It’s been cool because it will help me with my other jobs because I’ve learned so much doing stuff for my own project so I have a bigger portfolio, and get more work.
So much has happened since you first put the demo of “Meteor” on Bandcamp from NME folding its print version to [Canadian music video grant foundation] MuchFACT ending, the #MeToo and gender parity movements starting.
It’s pretty wild. So much of the structures that I learned how to make music in when I started are gutted or gone. It’s hard to stay on top of it. When I started playing with my first band Stella Ella Ola in 2012, even just with publications, there was a lot of blogs, but also they were well trafficked. People were just really invested in the scene and I’ve seen so many fade away, weren’t viable to keep going, people had to get other jobs. So much has shifted.
Did you pay attention to those changes as you were finishing the album and planning when and how to release it?
When we first started I was like, ‘People are still buying vinyl, but nobody is buying pop vinyl, so we’re never going to make a record. I’m just going to do single after single. And then I started to see like the way the system worked, and even though that was still kind of true, there was this really big push on having a whole record. Most of the structures, like radio and labels, you really need to have that bigger piece that everything is pointing towards, and then you see more vinyl being made for pop artists, not just rock bands. We started to shift our vision over and over again to fit in, which is great because I ended up where I wanted to be which is to actually make a record. That’s always what I wanted to do; I just thought there was no market for that.
I understand you had writer’s block?
Oh god, yeah, real bad [laughs]. I was writing by myself all throughout my youth, like Elliott Smith-style depressio [sic] [laughs], but then I started playing in a band and that’s how I started to learn how the system worked was with these three other guys, but Bossie is my first time ever having to do the bulk of all this writing and inhabiting the entire act, but still having to work in that system so I felt the pressure really fast.
But you put yourself there.
Yes, it was my choice because I didn’t want to cushion my experience. I loved the guys I was playing with and they were on tour all the time; they were playing in Hollerado, so I was like, ‘I don’t want to wait around for you guys to make my own music,’ so that’s why I started Bossie.
Why Bossie? Why not Anne?
The first thing is my name; I just didn’t want to use it. I’ve had pseudonyms in all the acts that I’ve had, but it was easier for me at the time to make this fake person and write for it. I thought that would be a good exercise for me, and because I’m not a big pop fanatic — that’s not what I listen to really — so I like the idea of trying to make this thing separate from who I was. I was so at odds with the visual when I first started, so it made more sense to separate, but it bit me in the ass later on because I was completely not invested.
But you enjoyed it even though it wasn’t your thing?
Yeah. I mean, I loved making the music. Pop is such a huge umbrella term obviously, but as soon as we started putting the stuff out, there were references to Cyndi Lauper and Katy Perry. I know Cyndi Lauper, but I always felt ‘We don’t sound anything like Katy Perry.’ I don’t really get that [laughs], but those connections tend to be made. To me, pop is like Gowan [Canadian ’80s solo artist, now the frontman for Styx]. I listen to The Beatles. These are my ideas of pop bands.
How did you hear of Gowan?
You hear his songs on the radio, but my dad actually played in a band with him back in the ’70s. But pop is such a flexible term. The music I make, I do think there are all these pop influences, but they’re not the same ones that people usually assume they are.
In your song “The Outsider,” there’s a sample of advice to young females on how to fit in. Is that a metaphor for entering into the music industry as a solo artist?
There’s this archive online with all these public domain films from the past century and a lot of them are mid-century, like social science videos that they would show teenagers in health class. This one was specifically about this girl who was kind of an anti-socialite, can’t really get along, bit of an odd duck and the whole thing is trying to condition kids to be like, ‘Don’t be like this girl — Susan Jane is her name — everyone thinks you’re a snob. Maybe if you just tried a little bit harder and didn’t scowl so much you’d have more friends.’ That’s what it’s about.
I do think that there is a bit of pressure on women in music to be pleasant and likeable, and just in general women are raised to be nice because if you’re not nice no one is going to want to work with you. We’ve all felt that at one time or another. I’ve worked with bands where I wasn’t happy with some of the conditions that I was dealing with, when I was surrounded by men and people were not treating me right. I got really angry, but the fact that I was angry wasn’t okay and I had to leave those situations entirely because my inability to be happy to be there was a problem.
What do you think of what’s happening now, not just women standing up and saying #metoo, but for gender parity in the workplace, artistic or otherwise?
I hope the conversation keeps getting bigger. I know music feels like it’s a few steps behind. I know it’s happening in TV, film and comedy, even theater had their moment here. I hope that we’ll be talking more about it, but it’s tough with music because there’s so little money; everyone’s fighting for scraps already, and it’s really scary to say anything on the harassment side. It’s even more insidious when it’s stuff like trying to find balance, and making sure people are being represented, and that the women are in the meetings at the table, and being asked their opinions, and not being pitted against each other. There’s a bad assumption that women don’t write their own music, and even women do that to each other. We’re all playing into this bad thinking.
What got you over the writer’s block and insecurity?
I made this fake character and that ended up being really constricting. When you try to be this thing that’s fake, I lost the wall between me and the thing really fast because you still have to pour yourself into the work, even if it is fake.
Can you define what the fake character was?
It was just a heightened pop character who is Bossie, but is sparkling, glittering, colorful and there’s a shy element. If you watch the videos, she’s a bit useless in a way, but there’s some truth of me in there too, but trying to be that colorful bright shiny thing, it was meant to be fake, and I ended up just trying to be it to make it easier. I merged all my socials together. There’s no Anne and Bossie anymore; it’s all just Bossie. I found that the boundary between me and that thing started to blur, and then I lost myself. I lost my sense of self about halfway through making the record, and I wasn’t enjoying it at all. I was super depressed, and had some stuff I had to work through. I had put so much expectations and pressure on myself to do it right and get it right and make it cohesive.
Is that because you got covered in NME, Noisey, and Stereogum, cool outlets that a lot of artists aspire to be in?
I think so. It’s not their problem that I put these standards on myself, but, yeah, it’s like this ego thing. As soon as you get feedback it’s like, ‘Oh man, they like it. I have to keep going making people like this.’ Then you realize you’re not doing it for yourself; you’re doing it for other people to validate you, which is very difficult to write under those circumstances. So I did let go of everything and just start over. The record we kept, I’m proud of it all.
It’s been a long journey. It’s funny when you make a record because it seems like it’s the beginning of something, but for me it’s like the end. I’m just like, ‘We’re gonna keep playing and touring it. It’s going to be a new life,’ but it’s been such a long emotional road for me because I went through all that crazy depression and had to start over. I quit a bunch of my jobs, personal stuff, so I kind of had nothing to lose. It was very tiring, but also this huge step forward in my life to see myself more clearly. Now that the records over, I get to close the book on that part. I know myself more than I used to and know what the stuff I’m never gonna know.
I don’t think I have it figured out, but I put a lot less pressure on myself now than I was during that whole process. It’s a luxury to make music. If you don’t like it, why do it?, So many people aren’t making enough money in this industry. There are so many problems; it’s fraught with issues; if you don’t really want to actually sit down and make it, why would you even bother? It was finding that joy again that was important.