Music has shaped and influenced Anouk Laure’s life since she was a child. Some of her fondest musical memories include family sing-alongs and learning to play guitar through her father’s old song book; following his lead in their living room. A good song still makes her day, and she can’t help singing along as lines from random songs get stuck in her head.
Anouk hopes to bring music, environmental education and cultural immersion together while travelling, working with communities to tell stories about her experiences and addressing local issues. To say Anouk is musical is a bit of an understatement, but that’s the sort of credit the humble singer-songwriter might give herself...if that much. There are only a handful instruments she has not explored, and although they might never all be mastered, Anouk thinks they could add new dimensions to her music.
Anouk is a classic, but modern folk singer-songwriter, her music influenced by everyone from Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Van Morrison to the Stars and Broken Social Scene, and add her little brother to that list as well. Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves. Anouk takes that emotion and puts it into song. Her songs tell stories in that classic folk style, written and performed out of a love of doing it. She writes what she feels, and she writes for her own art's sake, but her songs also grab her audience’s attention, as she won TVO’s Studio 2’s Ontario Song Contest with “What You’re Leaving Behind”. Anouk began her performing career at coffee houses, opening for such artists as Luke Doucet and Cuff the Duke, and will be touring in the coming months in preparation for her upcoming album, due later this year.
Anouk has experienced a lot in her life, and many of her songs have been written either in or about different parts of the world. She is free spirited, but has a strong attachment to her countryside home and family, a love for their island cottage in Northern Ontario (which she describes as “an extension of her”), and a strong connection to her French roots in the small village of Ecos in Normandy, France. The wind has blown her free spirit to feeling at home in a number of places around the world, including the foothills of the Himalayas in India, and on a three-masted schooner on the Atlantic Ocean. Meeting people and experiencing different cultural and natural environments have taught Anouk a lot about herself; inspiring her craft and shaping the artist within. |
