For Sacha, country music has never really been about image or performance first. The Canadian singer-songwriter has built her career by writing from real experiences — the difficult years, the rebuilding, the moments of self-doubt and the feeling of finally finding stability after chaos. That honesty is a big part of why her music continues to connect so deeply with listeners.
Over the last few years, Sacha’s career has steadily grown from writing sessions and smaller stages to major festival appearances at CMA Fest and Boots and Hearts, along with arena tours alongside acts like Old Dominion. Songs like “What the Truck” helped introduce her to a wider audience, but tracks like “Hey Mom I Made It” revealed a much more personal side of her songwriting, reflecting on homelessness, survival and personal transformation. Her latest project, Woman In The Mirror, pushes even further into vulnerability, opening up about the realities behind the milestones.
As part of Future of Music Canada, Sacha talks about finally making her Grand Ole Opry debut, staying grounded while her career grows, turning difficult memories into music and why she believes Canada will continue producing artists with global impact.
You’ve gone from smaller stages and writing sessions to performing at festivals like CMA Fest and Boots and Hearts, while records like “What the Truck” and “Hey Mom I Made It” introduced you to a much wider audience. Was there a particular moment recently where everything suddenly felt real to you?
The most recent moment where everything suddenly came into focus was when I had my Grand Ole Opry debut. That has been a long-time-coming dream, and I still can’t believe it finally came true. Standing in that circle was indescribable. Additionally, I just got off my first arena tour with Old Dominion, which was more of a pinch-me moment.
“Hey Mom I Made It” connected with people in such an emotional way because it wasn’t really about fame — it was about finally feeling seen after years of working toward something. Did writing that song change the way you looked at your own journey?
The song “Hey Mom I Made” it is less about feeling seen and more about navigating the most challenging and reckless times of my youth, including homelessness, and celebrating the transformation and redemption of being on a straight path and living my best life, in hopes of inspiring anyone else out there who feels like they are disqualified from living their truth and pursuing their dreams because of their environment and circumstances. Singing the song definitely keeps me grounded and constantly reminds me of where I came from.
Woman In The Mirror feels more vulnerable and self-reflective than some of your earlier music. What were the hardest parts of yourself to confront while making this project?
I feel like this album was the easiest to craft because I approached it as a ‘pull the curtain back’ exercise to give the audience a script from the journal of my heart and my life experiences. I found that in doing so, I was confronted with summoning the courage to speak about some of my experiences without fear of judgment.
Your songs balance emotional storytelling with these huge, singalong-ready hooks. When you’re making music, are you thinking more about the personal truth of a song or how it’s going to feel when thousands of people sing it back live?
When making music, it’s natural to think about both. When coming from a place of personal truth and how it is going to feel, I find that in my experience anything coming from an intimate place usually resonates. I’m all for hooks and earworms, which I like to weave into very personal songs as well.
A lot of artists talk about how difficult it is to stay grounded once their career starts accelerating publicly. As your audience keeps growing, what’s helped you stay connected to who you were before all of this started happening?
My personal journey has been a slow, progressively inclining journey and certainly not an overnight success, which has definitely served me in keeping me grounded and connected to who I am and where I started from. I am also no stranger to the unglamorous responsibilities and challenges of building and sustaining a career in music. That work is a constant anchor, influencing how I view public achievements and always making me genuinely grateful.
What can you tell us about upcoming projects and plans this year?
Summer festivals, working on new music and second album!
Your thoughts on the Future of Music in Canada.
Canada has contributed the world’s biggest stars in the music industry with a wide array of undiscovered and upcoming talent. I can only imagine that trend continuing, especially given the fact that our online platforms generate the ability for artists to reach and build a global fanbase.
Holzman and Hughes at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Courtesy of Ekko Astral
Holzman and Hughes in Brooklyn, May 2026.Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?