Ariane Mahryke Lemire Interview
Ariane Mahrÿke Lemire is a bilingual, multi-disciplinary artist and educator based in Edmonton, Alberta. Raised in a musical family, Lemire spent much of her childhood in Edmonton, with brief jaunts in Mexico and Saskatchewan. Throughout her family’s travels, her Francophone mother always insisted they speak French as a first language, and Lemire didn’t learn English until she was seven. Today, as an award-winning singer/songwriter, she flirts with folk, jazz, blues, and electro-acoustics while effortlessly moving from French to English. She writes and records in both languages, and even released her first album, Double Entendre, as a two-disc set in both French and English. Her steady affection for the two languages perfectly reflects the diversity of her Franco-Albertan heritage.
Career Highlights
Lemire has released four albums to date, Double Entendre (2008), Décousue (2010), Wrecked Tangles and Love Knots (2012), and Je deviens le loup (2016).
Two of her albums were financed by Rawlco Radios, a network of stations in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and the third by Musicaction, a non-profit organization that helps fund independent Francophone artists.
She has performed onstage at the Festival en chanson de Petite Vallée in Gaspésie, the Coup de coeur francophone in Montréal, the Rencontres d’Astaffort in France, and at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
In 2010, Lemire won the Edmonton Mayor’s Award for “Emerging Artist of the Year”.
She was nominated in 2011 and 2013 for a Regroupment Artistique Francophone de l’Alberta (RAFA) award for “Artistic Creation”, and was nominated for “Female Artist of the Year” at the Edmonton Music Awards in 2013.
In 2012 Lemire won the Calgary Folk Festival’s “Eye Candy Award” for her music video “I’m The Kind” from her 2010 album, Décousue. She won the award again in 2013 for her work on fellow Franco-Albertan singer/songwriter Mirielle Moquin’s music video.
She is a three-time Western Canadian Music Awards (WCMA) nominee. In 2008, Lemire won a WCMA for “Outstanding Francophone Recording”, and another in 2012 for “Video of the Year”.