Montreal's Hawa B brings a 'sadness chapter' to a close on her debut album Better Sad Than Sorry

For Hawa B, creating music is about allowing expression and experience to take form when words won’t suffice.

The Montreal musician, composer and vocalist (born Nadia Hawa Baldé) released her first full-length project, Better Sad Than Sorry, earlier this month.

Better Sad Than Sorry closes out the Sad series with a final installment of a project that began in 2022 with her debut EP, Sad in a Good Way. A second EP, Sadder but Better, dropped in April of this year.

Fittingly, she’ll celebrate the release this Friday, Nov. 29 at la Sotterranea with a launch concert in conjunction with Festival Triste, a four-day event that combines literature, theatre, film and music to draw attention to mental health and wellness.

On that front, Hawa B is doing okay these days.

“This ‘Sadness’ chapter is over,” Baldé said with a mix of relief and, perhaps, trepidation.

“Not that I’m going to stop being sad. That’s part of life. But that’s not where I am now, and not what my music will continue to reflect.”

Music, she described, has always been her method to express everything she feels she can’t say elsewhere, a reflection of her personality in sound and composition, singing and live performance, and a safe place for the parts of herself that otherwise stay hidden.

Singing has been Baldé’s outlet since early childhood. At four years old, she was already performing to Destiny’s Child in her living room, her love for music evident. By eight or nine, she was taking private lessons with her elementary school music teacher, learning songs and recording them in the teacher’s home studio.

“I’d take home a little album, like Christmas music and stuff like that. It was really cool.”

Vocal performance, Baldé explained, has always been something she did for herself, a passion that was self-motivated rather than fueled by external encouragement.

Singing Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera and other diva pop of the ’90s, she began to discover what would eventually manifest as a uniquely diverse, powerful vocal range she wields today.

Her friends and family thought she had a nice voice, she said, but her motivation to take singing and music seriously came from within.

“It has always been because I wanted to.”

In high school on Montreal’s South Shore, Baldé enrolled in a music-focused program, where her ambition remained personal and self-driven. When she moved on to CEGEP, she chose to study social sciences and math at Vanier College, choosing a school primarily to improve her English.

“I hated it to death,” she admitted. “But my friend was in the music program. I looked at her homework assignments and saw that this was something I’d benefit from.”

After her first semester, recognizing that her true interests couldn’t be set aside, Baldé enrolled in Vanier’s renowned music department and continued her studies as an undergrad, completing a Bachelor of Arts in vocal jazz.

Throughout those formative years, Baldé performed wherever she could, managing to carve out a fairly comfortable professional career as a backup singer and studio freelancer.

“My first stable, regular gig was at the House of Jazz in Montreal. And that’s where I met (acclaimed Montreal drummer) Anthony Pageot, along with lots of other session musicians who are still working all over the world today,” she said.

“So I wasn’t full-time invested in Hawa B yet.”

It wasn’t until after university, around 2016, that Baldé began to focus on songwriting, but that’s not when she got serious, either, she explained.

“I started putting the energy into it, I would say, in 2021. Right before I put out my first EP in 2022, I realized, ‘Okay, this is it. I’m releasing music and this is what I’m gonna do.’

“The more I got drawn into singing for hire — which I liked, and through which I got to experience performing in so many different types of styles — the more I realized that if I got comfortable, I wouldn’t have the time or energy to put into my project. And those gigs had nothing to do with (what I wanted for) my own career.”

In recent years, the collaborations Baldé has continued to foster with select Montreal and Quebec musicians such Hubert Lenoir and Greg Beaudin have increased her profile on stages around the province.

On Better Sad Than Sorry, Baldé completes a certain phase of her personal journey of emotional growth, ultimately finding a sense of closure.

“My music is personal because I put everything I repress into it,” she said. Her songs, she described, hold the emotions she feels are too complex or too taboo to voice in her daily life.

“I have a real need to express so much, and there are so many taboos and ideas that aren’t supposed to go together.”

In her music, she breaks down these divisions. For her, genres like soul and rock aren’t separate, and she rejects any idea that they should be.

“Anything can be anything,” she insisted.

Her creative process usually starts with rhythm. She builds the structure first, focusing on drums, chords and bass before vocals. While she’s deeply versed in music theory, thanks to her university studies, her process is instinctive. “I start almost all the time with music,” she explained. She composes in stages, letting rhythm and melody guide her as she shapes each song’s emotional landscape.

As a woman in music, Hawa B is familiar with the assumptions people make about her role as a singer; that she doesn’t write or compose or that she’s merely a nice voice, a notion she disdains.

“Sometimes when people hear a singer, they assume a producer must have created the music,” she noted.

That presumption drives her to create her music herself as much as possible.

“I have an obsession to write everything.”

That isn’t as much about ego as it is about disproving false conclusions and resisting the limitations of misinformed opinions.

“There are a lot of stereotypes about singers of any gender. And there are certainly a lot of stereotypes about women in general.

“When people see me and assume I’m an R&B singer, it gets on my nerves,” she said.

“I don’t like to be categorized, in general. And I mean, yes, I am an R&B singer. But I always try to bring that further than the expectation of what that means, and certainly in terms of what people might expect from me.”

While she works closely with Quebec studio producer Félix Petit, whose ear has helped hugely shape successful projects for the likes of les Louanges, Hubert Lenoir, Greg Beaudin and several others, Petit spends his time behind the boards bringing out the best of what Hawa B can be, rather than coaching along stylistic choices.

On stage, accompanied by Pageot and Petit, Hawa B brings alive the dissonance of grace and urgency at the core of her creative vision. The boys are just there to help make it bounce.

And while Baldé pursued a career in music because of her passion, her family did play an interesting role.

“Everyone in my home yells,” she laughed.

When teachers asked her how she had developed her vocal resonance, the answer was that it was out of necessity.

“It was an endurance exercise!”

But being loud is essential to be heard, Baldé noted more seriously, and her vocal strength and creative resilience are central to the appeal of her sound.

The closure of her Sad series relfects a personal milestone.

Moving beyond sadness doesn’t mean she’s leaving those emotions behind, but it does mark a new direction. Baldé now feels prepared to explore other themes, expanding her music to reflect where she is today. But before that, it’s time to tell her growing audience what it means to be Better Sad Than Sorry.

Perhaps more than anything else, Hawa B asserts her right to define her art on her terms.

“We always ‘bout the fresh shit. And if it’s not clear inside me, there’s always a method to make it come out.” ■

Hawa B launches Better Sad Than Sorry at la Sotterenea (4848 St-Laurent) on Friday, Nov. 29, 9 p.m., $19. For more on Hawa B, please visit her website.

For our latest in music, please visit the Music section.