Who is Charlotte Day Wilson, the favorite voice of rapper Drake?

When we caught up with Charlotte Day Wilson last July, we talked about her relationship with superstar rapper Drake. The question seemed a bit intrusive, perhaps even inappropriate, and we understood, from his uptight, half-mischievous half-embarrassed look, that the answer was valued at several million dollars. “I’m just waiting for his album to come out“, she retorted. A few weeks and teasings on social networks later, we discovered, and without much surprise, that the suave and deep voice (admittedly very doctored) had been sampled by the king of Lovers About the title Fair Trade, in its very dripping Certified Lover Boy. This same voice that, For a few months now, has been more and more recognized and appreciated, whether among pop, soul and even gospel lovers…

 

Charlotte Day Wilson has embedded herself in the heads of more than five million people, at about the same time, and most often without them knowing it. We are in the summer of 2019, at a time when everyone preferred to glue themselves to their screens rather than dive into salt water or invite themselves to the Too drunk evenings. A choice motivated by the broadcast of the first season of Euphoria, a hallucinatory series in the form of a total television experience, from which no one came out unscathed. Soaring and, as its name suggests, euphoric, the program produced by Drake (him again!) also stood out, at the time, for its equally insane soundtrack. Among the titles, therefore, is Work, by Canadian Charlotte Day Wilson, until now little known to the public. Alongside productions by Rosalia or Billie Eilish, it is nevertheless his ritornello that has eclipsed all the others and has been engraved in people’s minds like a tattoo penetrates the skin. Made of a haunting percussion, this powerful track, which also seduced the very serious French choreographer Boris Charmatz – himself declaring his adoration for the title on a major French radio channel – dresses, in the HBO box, a memorable scene: the budding love of Jules, a transgender teenager, and Nathaniel, who indulge in a dangerous game of seduction, masking their faces, via the messaging system of their mobile phone. “My music has often been used on television and in films and, to be honest, I don’t always watch them. Here, I didn’t expect it to be so good. And when I found out about the show, and I got to the episode where they used my song, I was like… Subjugated.” the singer tells us.

It must be said that love stories, tales for broken hearts and ballads that are supposed to heal them are the very essence of Charlotte Day Wilson’s music. She herself specifies, on her Instagram account, about her first album ALPHA, that it is the culmination of three years of work but above all the summary of a life of passions and “quee r sorrows“, these same wounds that she believes are shared by an entire community. Perhaps on her way to becoming an LGBT figure in music, the Toronto-born composer to an architect father and a writer mother has been participating, since 2016 and the release of her first EP CDW, in the mutation of pop. A genre that, since Solange’s A Seat at the Table (2016), has undergone a silent revolution. Once made of catchy structures and extremely well-calibrated R’n’B loops, pop got rid of its conventions before the emergence of artists like Beyoncé’s sister. “She is not trying to draw attention to the salesperson. She’s a designer: she took a lot of risks on When I Get Home [Solange’s latest album, released in 2019]. The songs didn’t have typical structures. The production was weird, there were very short titles…” remarks Charlotte Day Wilson.

 

With her gospel, soul, and folk scores, her heady choruses, and her album in the form of meditation and invocation to the supreme forces of spirits, the Canadian has jumped on the bandwagon already on the march of this metamorphosis. By mixing acoustics with more conventional soul productions, and by inviting Daniel Caesar, her compatriot R’n’B star, she brings an innovative vision:  transgressive, narrow-minded, and totally shunning mainstream productions. She prefers songs where the singer’s lyrics supplant the (too) catchy melodies. Because Chalotte Day Wilson is above all a voice, piercing and sunny, which resonates like a mantra rather than a whistle that has gone viral on TikTok. She is, as the name of her own label suggests, one of the “stone women”, those women who strive to dynamite well-established codes. In her case, those of female pop. 

 

ALPHA
(2021) by Charlotte Day Wilson, available.