Billianne on viral success, battling imposter syndrome and her years-in-the-making debut album
“Everything started with singing,” begins Canadian musician Billianne. From the age of four, she would go around her family home singing random songs that she had heard on TV shows or when listening to the car radio with her mum. “Everything was my stage,” she says. Her parents even turned their front porch into one. “I was always pretending,” she recalls, having joined school funk bands, played trombone and regularly performed recitals during her childhood. “I can’t remember not singing.”
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A family trip to Nova Scotia during which her brother put on Mumford & Sons’ first album is another fond music memory. “I liked the way that it brought us all together, memorising the words on a 19-hour drive and head-banging in the van,” she recalls of listening to 2009’s Sigh No More in full. Beyond the family bonding, a young Billianne was enamoured by Marcus and co’s lyrics: “I love their storytelling, they are such great songwriters and it’s really great folk music”.
While the foundations were set, it wasn’t until her late teens that she first picked up a guitar. “My dad always had a Norman in the house,” she reflects of the “Canadian staple”. He also had a Simon and Patrick, which Billianne used for most of her learning. Around the age of 17, she started trying to learn the instrument properly by covering songs. “I was always on Guitar Tabs and trying to figure out the songs,” she remembers, specifically citing doing a lot of two chord movements.
Image: Press
Best Is Yet To Come
Taking guitar as a subject during her last year of high school enabled her to “learn a little bit more”. She found it easy to pick up – at least at first. “With a lot of instruments, I always find it really exciting and fun at the beginning,” she says, having learned the G chord, D chord, A minor and F. “But getting past that point… I still feel that every time I try to learn something new on the guitar, it does feel hard to me.”
She persevered and, in 2021, began uploading cover videos to social media. “A lot of times I was singing to karaoke tracks from YouTube,” she recalls. But it was her rendition of Noah Reid’s 2018 song Simply the Best that proved the turning point. “That video was my first time finger picking,” Billianne recalls. “Half of the things with the guitar and me, I’m just like ‘well, I’ll give it a shot’.”
It worked: the cover caught the attention of Taylor Swift, Joe Jonas, P!nk, Oprah and Michael Bublé. “It’s wild,” she recalls. “I can’t believe those people may have found my name and looked me up and listened to my music.” The most surreal moment was the Joe co-sign: “he posted an Instagram story at a campfire with the track paired, which must mean he was listening to it, so that feels intimate to me”. Equally thrilling was the comment from Taylor – especially as she and her brother were Swifties and bonded over her albums Fearless and Red.
Aside from impressing big names, TikTok proved educational for Billianne. “I always look out for what guitars people are playing,” she says. Watching friends online also helped her discover alternate tunings. “I didn’t realise it was a thing. Obviously, there’s these three pegs that do something, but I didn’t realise people lowered the tune of their guitar and had these open tunings that create such inspiration. I felt like ‘wait, your guitar sounds so different from mine, what is going on?’”
As Billianne’s popularity on social media grew, she began playing shows. “There’s nothing like it, but when I first started performing with guitar, I was very nervous on stage,” she says. “It’s not my main thing, but I love how it pairs with my voice,” she adds. “And, once I do get it, it feels really special to be able to accompany myself in that way.”
While her nerves have decreased, she thinks those initial feelings came from still being in the process of learning the instrument. “I think it was a bit of imposter syndrome,” she considers. “I was thinking ‘I’m not a guitar player and there are probably guitar players in the crowd’.” Another worry was whether or not she was “playing the part well – the guitar part and the guitar player part”.
Remembering what she had learned in high school – about the importance of practicing – helped to gradually minimise these concerns. “That is what will make you feel more comfortable on stage,” she says. “I had to tell myself that, and I still believe that about guitar, especially with how much I know about it now. I think so many of my mistakes come from a lack of confidence rather than knowledge about what I’m doing. I need to be confident about where my fingers are going and what’s happening, but that comes with practice.”
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Show And Tell
Billianne’s biggest test came with her TV debut – on NBC’s Today, in April 2024. “That was really fun, and I was playing guitar live, which I was so nervous about.” With her band’s encouragement, her performance of folk-pop song Daydream went off without a hitch. “It was really cool to be live on TV while my parents are back in Canada; I think they must have thought ‘she’s the same little girl but she’s on TV’.”
In February this year, she made her second screen appearance, this time singing her song Enough on the TV show of a music “idol” she once messaged: Kelly Clarkson. “I don’t DM celebrities a lot, but I DM’d her way back in the day,” Billianne laughs, adding that she was a big fan of American Idol when she was a mentor on the talent show. “I said ‘I want to sing with you one day’, so hopefully that comes true,” she says. “It was great to have her hold the cover art of my song and introduce me.”
As well as building a name for herself across the US, Billianne scored a hometown hit with her song Crush, which made the Top 10 at Canadian Top 40 Radio. “These things are crazy to think about, like that was a real thing that happened,” she laughs of the success last summer. “It was being played everywhere. We would be in the car and hear it. My friends would send videos while they were in the dollar store.”
Billianne has since toured with Julia Jacklin, KT Tunstall and “Canadian legend” Serena Ryder – during a double-bill, the latter two met her on the night. “It’s so kind when big names care like that.” Serena has been keeping tabs on her growth since: “she DM’d me and said ‘you’re doing amazing, I’m just checking up on your page and everything looks so great’.”
Transportation Station
Now, Billianne is gearing up to release her debut album, Modes of Transportation, which has been in the works for three years.
“To have this big project that had so much thought and care and people working on it, that makes me feel more like an artist,” she says. As she rode her bike, took the train and learned to drive on the highway during that time, its layered title has multiple meanings. “It’s a metaphor of being in your twenties and figuring out how you get from who you are to who you want to be in the next 10 years.”
This journeying sense of discovery is channeled through the tracklist and pacing of the record, which was recorded across Ontario – from a downtown Toronto house to a quiet cabin in Huntsville and a family basement studio in Etobicoke. “We wanted to try out different sounds,” she says, adding that there are “there are so many guitars on this record”.
Having used them throughout the writing process and to channel different emotions, she doesn’t remember exactly how many, but says her collaborators Duncan [Hood] and Nick [Ferraro] are “a little bit geeky with this stuff”. They would choose a Nylon instead of a steel string “to suit the vibe of the song,” she says, adding that the lyrics usually come first. “I tend to have song starts and ideas. Sometimes it’s a full verse, or the chorus melody, or a line and then I take it to Nick and Duncan and we work it out.”
For the song Future Emma, she remembers them discussing the tone of the electric guitar because it starts the track and “needed to be exactly what I wanted”. Meanwhile, the track ‘Let Me Run’ sees the three of them each play a different guitar: “I start that track and then they come in on guitar, so that was special”. It’s also the only one where she plays guitar on track, which is something Billianne is keen to do more of. “Recording a guitar is a totally different thing,” she says; “it’s so humbling”.
As an artist who is always working on the next thing – “there’s lots more to come,” she teases – her message to aspiring guitar players is simple. “You’ve just got to pick it up and try something,” she encourages. “Sometimes it looks so scary sitting in your room. It’s like ‘Oh my God, there’s this thing with six strings and you can do so many things on it… but the options are endless’.”
Modes of Transportation is out now. Billianne tours the UK in November.
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