Two indigenous Canadian stars team up to electrify us…
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[6.75]
Thomas Inskeep: Buffy Sainte-Marie is a legend, pure and simple, who in her mid-70s is making some of the best, and certainly some of the most fiery, music of her career. Tanya Tagaq is potentially a legend in the making, following in Sainte-Marie’s footsteps as an indigenous Canadian artist who says and sings what she believes. They’ve each won the prestigious Polaris prize (for the best Canadian album of the year), and now they team up on this one-off single that’s all ferocity and hope. Tagaq contributes her by-now famous throat singing, while Sainte-Marie takes the lead, singing like her life depends on it. This upbeat rocker drives and lunges its way into your head, and heart, and is utterly superb.
[10]
Katie Gill: I still can’t get over that chorus. It’s downright AMAZING. “You Got to Run (Spirit of the Wind)” just builds up to this explosion of sound, as the drums, guitars, and chorus just combine to create something loud, beautiful, and downright powerful. And I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know anything about throat singing so I don’t know how much my opinion matters in the grand scheme of things, but at least from this novice perspective? The added layer of percussion that Tagaq brings to the song elevates it to new heights. Yeah, the lyrics might be a little cheesy and a little generic, but the song itself is just amazing that I’m willing to overlook that slight cheesiness.
[7]
Mark Sinker: Find I’m reacting a bit the way I do to late Oasis: much more interested in the odd noises above and below and round the edges of the song; in all the elements obscured by the loud and fairly charmless anthem grinding through the the middle.
[3]
David Sheffieck: This traffics in cliches, maybe, but Sainte-Marie and Tagaq (backing, but just as essential) deliver them with the sort of repurposed urgency that I feel like I’m hearing them with new ears. Sainte-Marie switches between conversational and torch singer, between the intimate and the arena, with a deceptive and powerful ease; the production shifts nearly as nimbly as her voice and manages to double her propulsion. The rare song that proves inspiration doesn’t have to be corny to work.
[8]
Micha Cavaseno: Any of y’all heard Saint-Maire’s Illuminations? When she wants to, Buffy Sainte-Marie can do some bugged out shit with the extremities of voice, and it gets nowhere near the fanatical cults of other singer-songwriters she’s often paired beside/against. Given how Tanya Tagaq can make her voice sound like something otherworldly, it’s the very normalcy of this record that disappoints. Sure, the anthema and the earthiness are noble and unifying, positive messages for the current times, but does it mean much if recognition of Tanya just gets to be dressing atop a generic folk-rock stomper?
[4]
Ryo Miyauchi: Tanya Tagaq goes a little unnoticed in a crowded room, but no matter. Everything here, including Tagaq, takes a backseat to make way for Buffy Sainte-Marie, whose straightforward lyrics make an impact with or without the dramatic build to the climax. Whatever form Sainte-Marie wished this to take, be it as an even larger epic or a just her, Tagaq and an acoustic guitar, it would’ve hit just as urgent.
[6]
Anthony Easton: One of the things that I have seen written about this, is that it is Sainte-Marie’s track–that she sings over Tagaq. I am not sure that it is the case. The Inuit vocalisations through the edge of this, a psycho-geographic construction of an indigenous self hood. Though it is about a dog sled, it is also about voice, and finding voice, and separating voice–moving from the general to the specific, from one anecdote about an example of resistance, to an ongoing moral desire for a generalised resistance. This is where I think it would be alright if Tanya was taking a back seat, that it would be a mark of noting Sainte-Marie as an elder, that her work would not exist without Sainte-Marie. That they work so well together makes complicated beauty.
[7]
Dorian Sinclair: Considered absent context, the lyrics of “You Got to Run (Spirit of the Wind)” could read as a fairly toothless call for self-empowerment. But considering them absent context would be a mistake. This is a song steeped in Native histories and culture, from the inspiration (championship dog musher George Attla) to the musical style, which merges the distinct Indigenous traditions Sainte-Marie and Tagaq pull from to form something that’s new to both of them. When Sainte-Marie sings “Hey, we been so down. Been so broken, bent so low we kissed the ground”, you can hear the edge in her voice that tells you she’s speaking with all the perspective that a five-decade career as artist and activist offers. Pairing that with the perspective of Tanya Tagaq, a generation younger but a trailblazer in much the same way, is inspired. I don’t know how this song sounds to someone who isn’t Native, or who isn’t familiar with either artist’s story — but for me it’s frankly electric.
[9]