Katie Tupper Is a Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Neo-Soul

A couple of days after Toronto was hit with the biggest snowfall in the city’s history, Katie Tupper pops up on my screen in her post-blizzard best: head-to-toe grey sweatsuit, with her hoodie up and a black skully covering her head. Talking from her home in the Canadian metropolis, she also admits that she hasn’t washed her hair in a few days—a truly relatable fact in the middle of a hellish cold wave where even looking outside is somewhat fraught. Amid such conditions, Tupper’s devil-may-care coziness is not surprising, but the normal, lilting range of her speaking voice might be: Chatting with her, you’d never guess that she’s in possession of a rich, husky alto that deepens every emotion she sings about. Or that she is a 23-year-old musician who, if she wants to, could probably become a big star. 

On Tupper’s debut album, Greyhound, she blends the vocal runs of a neo-soul acolyte with a light pop touch, folds jazz runs into melodies that would sound ideal on UK garage remixes, and caps it all off with a country-girl ballad with aching existential lyrics like, “Hottest of summers, atheist mothers/I can’t die alone if I’ve got multiple lovers.” On “Right Hand Man,” an upbeat pop song with a tinge of funk guitar, she sings about the way a suffocating lover is making her consider a life of monasticism: “Did you get my invite?/I wanna throw a party/Then move out to the badlands/And never speak again.” Tupper grapples with the conventions of life and love with wry humor and an observant eye as she tries to untangle the nuances of codependency, sensuality, and maturing beyond a place that can’t fit her ambitions. 

Tupper grew up in the suburbs of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a midsize city in the lower hinterlands of Canada, where her great-parents immigrated from Ukraine. “I grew up eating a lot of bland root vegetables and boiled meat,” she says with a dry laugh, “so I feel like the spirit of my Baba moves through me.” 

In Saskatoon, she learned piano and sang in a children’s choir, but the thought of becoming a professional musician was so farfetched she didn’t even consider it. Her parents were into music—they introduced her to Diana Krall and Norah Jones, Lady Gaga and Lana Del Rey—but she spent her time playing for the high school hockey team; she was ambivalent about it, but at least it filled the hours between class. Then, in 2017, when Tupper was nearing the end of high school, the cover songs she posted for fun on social media caught the eye of a neo-soul producer who asked her to sing on some of his tracks. After their music began garnering millions of plays on streaming, she had a revelation: Oh my gosh, if you have access to a computer, you can sing on things and might be able to pay rent with it one day.

After a year or two, though, Tupper found herself at the University of Saskatchewan, yearning for more control over her music. She also discovered the endless grooves of D’Angelo, which she describes as formative. “I was like, Holy shit, this is the most important music that's being made.” Her late-teens entry into neo-soul and jazz led her to Erykah Badu, Sade, and beyond. She began splitting her time between Saskatoon and Toronto, meeting musicians through her friend and fellow singer Georgia Harmer. “She brought me to this incredible live music event called Listening Room, where a house band will learn a full discography of a neo-soul artist,” Tupper explains. “The first night was a Roy Hargrove night, and it felt like this whole world in Toronto had opened up.”

Becoming an avid student of neo-soul completely changed Tupper’s musical trajectory. While Greyhound has some of the “prairie” influence of her hometown— “Tennessee Heat,” for instance, has a country-folk swing and slide guitar—it’s rooted entirely in soul, a direction she’s been honing since a rep at her label, Arts & Crafts, asked her to describe her sound. “I really want to get as close as I can to making neo-soul music in a way that’s respectful to its deep, rich culture,” she recalls thinking, “while still respecting the fact that I’m a white woman from Saskatchewan.” 

You can hear this evolution on Tupper’s 2023 EP, Where to Find Me, a more conventional neo-soul work that garnered her a Best Traditional R&B/Soul nomination at the 2024 Juno Awards. But for Greyhound, she let herself be looser, bringing in elements of pop and jazz alongside producers Justice Der, and Felix Fox of the soulful instrumental group BadBadNotGood. “There’s a foundation of soul and jazz that bleeds through the music because it’s made by highly professional, proficient jazz musicians, without the pressure of trying to make a certain sound,” Tupper explains. “Instead, it’s just a little bit indie and a little bit more pop and a little bit more relaxed.” 

Part of the reason she’s got a folkie-country joint, an electro-pop track about being lonely at the bar, and a few songs that really show her love for D’Angelo in one album is because her label and producers encouraged her to rely on her voice as Greyhound’s coherent force. Her lyrics, too, create a vivid picture of who Tupper might be as a person and thinker; during our conversation, she recommends the book she’s reading, Bill Broder’s Red Notice, about a U.S. financier who began investing in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union as a fairly wild way to expose oligarchical corruption. Tupper wrote Greyhound’s lyrics rapper-style, tapping away on her phone as she listened to her producers jam out in the studio. But in a way, she says, she’s still learning her style, focusing on songwriting and studying the way her favorites do it. “I want to be able to make music in a way that I feel very proud of and that feels timeless,” she says, citing recent Best New Artist Grammy winner Olivia Dean as a heartening path to follow. “I would love to do it in a way that can still capture a bit of rawness in my vocals and in my songwriting.” She continues, “And I would love to, um, dominate the world.” I can see it!