CHARLOTTE DAY WILSON
THIS TORONTO NATIVE SERVES UP SOLEMN SOULFULNESS. BY LISA MISCHIANTI. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARCUS MAM. STYLED BY MARCELL ROCHA

“I think they’re active listeners,” says Charlotte Day Wilson of her ever-growing fan base. “I’m really lucky to have listeners who are actually paying attention to the details of the production and the instrumentation.” Those details are indeed worth noting on Wilson’s powerful new EP, Stone Woman, for which she served as a writer, singer, producer, and instrumentalist. “I had been practicing producing for a long time, but I guess I didn’t think I was good enough to actually put something out there that could potentially be on, like, Spotify. So when I did [my first EP] CDW, I really pushed myself to get better and better,” she recalls. “But now that I listen to it, I’m like, wow, the production is kind of naive and immature sounding. I think with Stone Woman, I’ve definitely honed my production chops a lot more and I’m collaborating with some really great players to curate the sounds that I’m going for, exploring some of the darker tones that I shied away from in CDW.”

Stone Woman is certainly steeped in a heightened sense of melancholy. The achingly wrought, six-song meditation on love and loss opens with its namesake track and the spare, stripped-down “Doubt,” ultimately finishing with the tellingly titled “Falling Apart” and “Funeral.” “I was obsessed with [Maggie Nelson’s] Bluets when I was making this EP. It’s a really amazing piece of, like, semi-poetry,” explains Wilson, and the influence of Nelson’s lyrical-prose literature laced with sorrow and solitude is quite apparent. But amid this somberness, Wilson’s signature rich, soulful vocals shine through.

It’s this sound that places her at the forefront of the vibrant R&B movement for which Toronto has become known, although she asserts that there is much more diversity to the scene than meets the eye. Her recent collaborations with acts like fellow Torontonian Daniel Caesar make her hometown pride palpable. “We’re pretty close friends, so it was a really natural collaboration for us. We’ve known each other for, I guess, three or four years now. As soon as I heard his song ‘Violet’ I fell in love with it and was like, who is this?” she says of her history with Caesar. Speaking to that unifying local thread, she continues: “Mutual friends introduced us. We’re all part of the same community in Toronto, so whenever I’m back and he’s back in Toronto, we’re all hanging out.”