Sister Ray is the project of Toronto-based singer-songwriter Ella Coyes. The latest Sister Ray record, Believer, is out April 4, 2025 on Royal Mountain.
(Photo Credit: Vanessa Heins)
Charlotte Cornfield is a Toronto-based singer-songwriter; Ella Coyes — aka Sister Ray — is also a Toronto-based singer-songwriter. The new Sister Ray record, Believer, is out this Friday via Royal Mountain. To celebrate, the friends got together to catch up about it, and much more!
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Charlotte Cornfield: I was just remembering when we hung out in Budapest, and it was my birthday and we got a burger. And then I told you I was pregnant.
Ella Coyes: Yeah, I was just thinking about that. We went for dinner — and I think my guitar got lost that day also.
Charlotte: Right.
Ella: Because I used your guitar. I knew it was going to get lost — I just knew in my heart when I gave it to the guy, when I got on the plane in Toronto, I was like, That ain’t making it. There’s just no way. [Laughs.] And then, yeah, we went for dinner and you were like, “Also, I’m pregnant.”
Charlotte: Yeah, in my head I was like, Oh, the first few months of pregnancy are when you’re sick, and then it ends, so these shows are going to land in a good place. But I was still a little bit sick.
Ella: Wow, I didn’t even think about that. You were really doing dates in that time — because we played that [show], and then you went on actual tour after that.
Charlotte: Right. But it was a challenging tour for many reasons. One of them was that I was sick, and another one was that Steve [Foster, a member of Charlotte’s band] was sick. So both of us were sick and just trying to get through these random UK shows.
Ella: Also, those shows feel like such a slog. Anytime I’ve done the UK, I’m just like, What? I have a hard time in the UK.
Charlotte: Yeah, it’s not cushy. But the last time I was there was for End of the Road, and just End of the Road, which is an incredible festival. We played in 2023, and it was when my daughter was four months I think, so Nelson [Charlotte’s partner] came. It was really fun just carting our baby around this awesome festival. And there were so many babies there, and everybody there decorates their strollers with Christmas lights and stuff.
Ella: Do you bring her with you everywhere?
Charlotte: I did when she was really little. Now she’s almost two and especially for short things, it’s just easier to leave her for a couple of days at home. She’s in her routine, she’s in daycare. If it’s a fun thing, or a festival that is super kid friendly, or we’re visiting people, then it’s great to bring her. Nelson came with and we brought her when I supported Bonny Light Horseman in October, and that was really fun because it was also a relatively relaxed schedule. But now she’s full-on toddler and doesn’t like to be contained, so having her in a car — she would just be miserable. [Laughs.]
Ella: So when you went and made this last record, did you just go by yourself or did her and Nelson come at all?
Charlotte: Yeah, so I just made a new record in January in New York. I went down for 10 days, and after five days, Nelson brought her down for a few days. Then they left, and I came back a couple of days later. So it kind of broke it up nicely and it didn’t feel like I was away from her that long. But also our families have been super, super helpful. They’re around and they just step in. So, yeah, it takes a village.
Ella: That’s so cool. When I think about the idea of being a musician and being on the road, having a kid seems so… I can’t even fathom it. And I’ve seen a few people do it — when I was younger, I remember seeing people at Canmore Folk Festival having their kids backstage, and I went on tour with Basia [Bulat] and that was, like, kid frickin’ city. Everybody told me it’d be like that, and it was so fun. But it’s so cool seeing that.
Charlotte: It is. There are so many people doing it, and everybody is happy to help each other out with advice connections — “Do you have a babysitter in X, Y, Z city,” and stuff like that. It’s a cool, unexpected, fun community to be part of. It doesn’t feel isolating at all. It just feels good to know there’s a lot of people doing it.
Ella: Yeah. The other thing I think about with parents — I mean, I don’t know anything about it, this is just speculating — I wonder how it’s changed the way that you write songs, or even the way that your time is shaped out? I haven’t had a restaurant job or something in a year, so I kind of have all the time in my life to write and there’s no schedule; I don’t have an obligation to anybody else to not be doing that. And I feel like for me, a lot of the time when I’m writing, I’m like, I have to do it right now.
Charlotte: Yeah, the idea comes in and you have to get to it.
Ella: Yeah, and then it’s gone so quickly. How does that change when you have an obligation to another person who is on a schedule and is your child?
Charlotte: I feel like it makes me more focused in the time that I do have. Like, OK, I have this window to write. She started daycare when she was a year-and-a-half, so [before then], that whole time I was home with her — because Nelson went back to work right away — I didn’t realize that I was writing, but I was. When I sat down to write this record, I revisited my voice memos and there were all these little fragments where I recorded something and then she started crying, or she was sleeping and then she woke up. And in my head I had discarded it and thought, I won’t come back to this, because I didn’t finish it. But then I revisited these ideas and it was like, Even this 30-second idea was cool. There were a couple of those that ended up on this record.
But it was very much when she started daycare — which I’m so grateful that we have subsidized daycare in this country, even though it’s hard to get a spot and you still have to jump through hoops. That’s been incredible. She loves having activities and kids and stuff to do during the day, and now it’s like my days are concentrated. She started daycare in September, and I knew that I was going to make the record in January, so I just spent September to January in writing mode. It was nice to be able to book that off.
For your record, what was the time span that you wrote it over?
Ella: I think same thing — I had a bunch of little fragments, always just kind of writing, lots of barely ideas. Then I recorded it last April. I had been out of a cycle for a while, and my team was like, “OK, so, you actually have to make a record now.” So I honestly kind of panic wrote it. I really did the bulk of the writing over the two months before I went and made it. And then a couple of the songs, I finished writing them in studio, which I really liked that. I had not done that before. I felt so precious about the songs — which is a fault, I think, sometimes. But you’re like, “It’s about my life and it really means something, I can’t lose this lyric or that.” But at the end of the day, that’s not always what services the song the best, being so attached to those little details. So I finished some of the songs in the studio. And it was just Jon [Nellen, producer/engineer] and I the whole time, pretty much, which was really nice.
Charlotte: So between you, you kind of played all the [parts].
Ella: Yeah. We went into it and we would just play — we didn’t use a click on this record at all. I just wanted to be playing music. So all of the beds, it’s either me playing guitar, Jon playing drums, me singing. We wouldn’t comp anything after that, which was really fun. Or it would be both of us playing guitar or something like that. We’d just keep going until we agreed that we had it. And I had never done this before, but we didn’t listen back to any of the other takes. We would just agree that was the take, and then work off of that.
Charlotte: That was the same as this process that I just had. It’s so nice, because [going back and listening to the takes] takes up time, and you turn on that critical brain that’s like, “Is this good?” Whereas if you just play a thing, you’re both like, “It’s good,” and you can move on.
Ella: It’s nice because you get to stay in that zone instead of switching into, “I’m being critical now and I’m listening.” I found when you both know, that feels so good, and you’re playing really free and you’re really in the music and you feel so excited about continuing. I found in the past that listening is such a wall to that, where I’m like, “Oh, well, I don’t like how I sang that, I guess we should fix that.”
Charlotte: Yeah, there’s something freeing about just being like, “We can’t change it. That’s what we chose.”
Ella: Yeah. Something that I really admire so much about you is, I was looking at credits from your past records, and it’s really no one that I see you gig with. I feel like it’s nice to have a separation in those spaces, because they just feel so drastically different to me. They’re a totally different job.
Charlotte: Yeah, totally.
Ella: I feel like a different person when I’m making records versus when I’m playing shows. So was that a thing that you consciously said, “I’m not gonna make records with the people that I’m on the road with,” at a certain point?
Charlotte: It wasn’t so much a conscious decision as, I always have this drive to make a different record from the last one I made — and often geographically, it’s just landing in a different city — and part of that is bringing on different people. Because it’s so exciting to have new people to work with. I made a record years and years ago, Future Snowbird, that was like a band record with the folks who I was playing with at the time. And then Shape of Your Name, Steve and Sam [Gleason] were on it a little bit. It’s really nice to record with those folks too, but I also like having it be amorphous, and just really being able to dip into new voices and generate new ideas. It’s just fun to do something different.
Ella: I also find geographically changing space is really fun. And this last record was the first time I had done it — I went into making it saying, “I really can’t make it in Toronto.” It’s really important, I think, to go somewhere else. Partially because, when I’m done in the studio, we didn’t really do that much after. I just would go back to the apartment and read and have dinner and it was really quiet. I liked not running into someone on the street and they’re like, “How was your day?” I don’t want to think about that.
Also, I was listening to “Walking With Rachael” before you got here, and that song is so Toronto. I really felt like this last record that I wrote feels it’s all really happens in Toronto; it feels like this place to me. And it was really nice to be singing songs that really feel like they happen in a place, and not be in that place while working on it.
Charlotte: It’s the power of separation from the environment. I was thinking about “Animal Thing” and picturing a bar — that’s such a beautiful song. But I find that, too, being removed from the subject matter geographically is really helpful.
When you were writing this record, were there certain things that were coming up?
Ella: I think a lot of it was, I turned 25 and just felt a total shift in who I was as a person. I feel like I literally went from girl to woman. [Laughs.] I moved across the country in 2020, so I feel like so much of it, I’m talking to my younger self. And a lot of my friends have been having kids, so I’ve been around kids a lot more and thinking about my future in that way. Which was cool because I think historically my brand, both professionally and personally, was being really sad, just being chronically depressed. And I think I really felt a shift on this one. There’s a song called “Magic,” and it was the first time I wrote a song and I was laughing a lot while I was writing it. It felt so full of joy to arrive at this idea. It’s just this song of me talking to myself, self-soothing a little me. I had never had that experience writing music before — and I had it in the studio as well, just smiling even we would do vocal passes. I’d say to Jon, “I think I have to smile when I sing this thing. I can hear myself smiling, and it matters.”
Charlotte: I love that.
Ella: I never imagined myself writing music like that. And I’ve talked to you about this before, about how fun it is to watch you play these songs that are just about being gentle. That song “Walking With Rachael,” just the last repeating lines, “I’m happier than I was” — that felt like a revelation to me, because I just don’t think I see it that often.
Charlotte: Yeah. I was talking to Tamara from the Weather Station about that too. I definitely feel like, for a lot of my life, my songs were coming from a place of melancholy and trying to process things that were happening that I was struggling with. But I think in this last chunk of time… I mean, I’ve always been so drawn to human relationships and the nuances of them, and there’s so much to be found in the joy and love and relief and happiness that is also really powerful and strong to draw from. And that’s been a freeing thing in my songwriting too, to not feel like it has to come from a place of sadness. I’m curious, for you, is finding community and camaraderie and friendship in Toronto part of what’s contributed to your outlook?
Ella: Yeah, for sure. I love living here. I hated it the first while that I lived here, but I moved deep in the pandemic.
Charlotte: Right.
Ella: I remember getting a beer with Vanessa Heins — she shot the cover for my last record — and she had moved here from Vancouver over a decade ago, and I just asked her, “When am I going to stop hating it so much?” [Laughs.] When I lived in Edmonton, there was such a strong DIY scene and I’m so thankful to have come from that. But I love being able to go to The Tranzac. Honestly, it is about the community and the camaraderie, but it’s also about being able to be around musicians that I’m so inspired by all the time. That’s so meaningful, because I feel like every time I go to see a show, I’m so excited to get home and write music.
Charlotte: It’s the best.
Ella: I had that in Edmonton, but I have it more here. I think I’m around more songwriters here — and whose records I really love, whose records I really actively am listening to all the time. I love being at the Baby G and being like, “I gotta go home right now, actually. I cannot hang out.” That’s such a joy. You’re from here, right?
Charlotte: Yeah, I am. And I lived in Montreal for a while, in New York for a couple of years. So I never had that experience of moving to Toronto for the first time — which I am very impressed by everyone who’s done it and stuck it out, because it’s a hard city. There’s a lot of ways in which it’s a hard city geographically; it can be not very navigable. I found when I was living in New York, I would literally be eating a taco and someone would come in and be like, “Hey, my name’s Jared. Let’s be friends.” And that is just not how Toronto is at all. [Laughs.] But at the same time, coming in in the context of the music community, already knowing a few people, you can kind of crack into a lot of different people.
Ella: Also, Canadian music is so small.
Charlotte: It’s so tiny, it’s insane.
Ella: We are all just one degree away from each other at all times, so when I came here, I had lots of friends that lived here whose music I’d been excited about for a long time.
Charlotte: Yeah, I really like it here. I believe in Toronto. [Laughs.] And like any city, there are things that frustrate me, but it’s home and it is a really great city. And you just touched on how incredible the community is — people are so supportive of each other.
Ella: Yeah, which people ask me about that. My family will ask me if it’s competitive, and it’s just not. I don’t have that experience here at all. Everyone is so stoked. It’s so nice to know that I can call a friend if I need help with something and people are really down and pull through and go to each other’s gigs. I really like living somewhere where I really care about the records that are coming out of here. Like, I’m not just listening to my friends’ records because they’re my friends’. I actually love their records. Which really makes me feel proud to be from here and to be a Canadian musician.
(Photo Credit: Vanessa Heins)
