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.
A past show produced by The Concert Production for Sidhu Moose Wala.
The Concert Production founders Sohail Mansuri and Zeeshan Siddiqui. Photos: Courtesy of The Concert Production
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Drake onstage in Toronto last year
Everybody Likes Drake Again. That Means We’re Healing
Not to be dramatic or anything, but not too long ago, listening to people talk about Drake, you’d think he would never top the charts again. But here we are: With Iceman, he’s broken his own record, earning a 13th week atop Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart on Sept. 5, surpassing Take Care’s 12-week run more than a decade ago. The achievement comes after the great rap civil war of 2024, which was framed as everything from a referendum on Drake’s character as a human being to a cleansing of what popular radio host Ebro would describe, in February 2025, as “a sickness in the game.”
Again, not trying to be dramatic, but even if you were skeptical of the discourse circa 2024, it is a bit shocking to hear the public’s recent re-embrace of Drake. Consider how far the frenzy around the most salacious allegations on Kendrick Lamar‘s “Not Like Us” extended. There was Christopher Alvarez, a disabled journalist, being dragged into conspiracy theories. There was the woman from the resurfaced concert footage, now 31, having to publicly dispute the creepy significance strangers had assigned to an onstage kiss from when she was 17. Drake said in his lawsuit against UMG that the threats had forced him to pull his seven-year-old son out of school.
What now feels like the absurdity of the moment registered as something deathly serious at the time. By September 2024, Lamar was releasing the ominous “Watch the Party Die,” just days after his Super Bowl halftime performance was announced. Oh, also, a major talking point in American culture a year and a half ago was whether one of the biggest superstars in the world would be publicly branded a pedophile during the Super Bowl.
In what world would any celebrity recover from that?
Except, with time, the online frenzy surrounding the Drake and Lamar feud reads more like a mass-psychosis event than a cultural reckoning. The music, oddly enough, often seemed secondary to the certainty of everyone discussing it. “Not Like Us” was a veritable hit, absolutely. But its cultural dominance became bound up in a widespread vilification of Drake that curdled online, where the most damning interpretation of anything could quickly become the accepted one. For a while, even putting on a Drake song could feel like something you had to explain, as if listening amounted to taking a position on the allegations.
That this all happened in 2024 is meaningful. This was right in the peak of Elon Musk’s reconstruction of Twitter, privileging rage bait and engagement tactics that helped misinformation disseminate like fact. It was also the beginning of AI tools becoming sophisticated enough to produce convincing-sounding tracks. Even before Drake released his first response, “Push Ups,” AI-generated response tracks were circulating across social media. And so, in many ways, the well of public opinion was already poisoned.
Listeners’ recent embrace of Drake feels settled in a broader cultural shift brewing since 2024. The beef, in hindsight, feels like a dying vestige of whatever people want to call “Woke 1.0”: a particular faith that exposing the right person could amount to a cultural transformation. For a moment, defeating Drake seemed to promise something about the future of hip-hop, about who would belong in it and what it would tolerate.
There were obvious holes in the argument, namely who exactly these arbiters of culture were and why they were uniquely qualified to speak for the entirety of Black people, questions that Drake pokes at on “Ran to Atlanta” from Iceman. Still, these were never even supposed to be binding philosophical truths in the first place. To hear levelheaded commentators discuss it, this was all simply entertainment — two of the genre’s greats duking it out. Even one of the beef’s catalysts, Metro Boomin, echoed the sentiment, lamenting how online fans had turned the battle into something sinister. Hell, even Jay-Z said something similar before himself tossing a few jabs at Drizzy in a freestyle at the Roots Picnic this year. But the artists themselves supplied the allegations. The ability to raise those stakes and then retreat into “simply entertainment” was part of the dynamic, too.
Even so, how it all devolved into a pseudocultural reckoning says more about the environment fans exist in today than it does about either Drake or Lamar. In the years around the beef, shocking revelations about Diddy as well as the global elite’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have become folded into the background, alongside a sense that accountability remains selective. This atmosphere of collective powerlessness offers one explanation for the conspiratorial thinking at the heart of Lamar versus Drake. A frustration with an increasingly degraded world and dwindling resources to change it means outrage can mobilize an enormous number of people very quickly, with little holding them together once the moment passes.
The language of exploitation and cultural extraction gave the battle a purpose that seemed to extend well beyond either rapper. But even if you took the least charitable opinion imaginable of our Canadian hitmaker, what was supposed to happen after Drake was defeated? The industry whose supposed wickedness Drake allegedly embodied carried on selling the spectacle itself.
What everyone was caught up in was an appetite with a longer history than the social media platforms now feeding it. Lance Oppenheim’s new film, Primetime, returns to Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator, a television format that made public humiliation feel like a public service. The connection is in the experience offered to the audience. The viewer could enjoy the confrontation with the reassuring sense that watching served some larger good. Never mind if anything that was unfolding on screen amounted to justice.
In the historian Anton Jäger’s book-length essay Hyperpolitics, published earlier this year in English, he describes how the past decade’s surge of political feeling has coincided with a continuing withdrawal from communal life. More isolated digital environments can fuel extraordinary mobilization without the actual community organizations that might turn it into something tangible. Negating Drake, then, became a gesture in itself. A means of signaling a broader dissatisfaction with the direction of hip-hop culture. Where the problems extend to technology and the demoralizing margins of streaming music, for a while it felt good for people to just wrap it all up in one word: Drake.
But on Iceman, it’s hard to take the idea of Drake as an evil force within hip-hop very seriously, even as he himself makes an effort to lean into the role of the villain. Drake’s music is most potent when it’s aimed at the masses, even if he swears his nice-guy days are over. This is the Degrassi kid turned global superstar rivaling Taylor Swift, after all.
Now, with Fear of Missing Out, Drake’s cryptically announced project slated for release this week, we’ve entered a second kind of Drake Renaissance. However delusional it seems, there was a moment when it felt somehow wrong to play Drake. His return to the top of the charts suggests a good deal of people were eager to get back to listening.