By Rick Garrick
THUNDER BAY — Red Rock Indian Band’s Sara Kae recently tackled the subject of depression and mental health with the release of her latest single, One Good Reason, on Jan. 10.
“One Good Reason is a song of perseverance,” Kae says. “I wrote the line, one good reason, as a challenge to the things in life that might try and knock me down and keep me there. I was trying to challenge my own thoughts of giving up and living in my own despair instead of trying my best to work towards happiness, which is easier said than done at times. I wrote this song knowing that many struggle with these same thoughts, and music is what allows us out of isolation a bit.”
Kae says she had been feeling a lot of sadness and was overwhelmed with life when she wrote the song.
“I felt like I was drowning in just everything in life and kind of what was expected of me and feeling as if I was never doing enough or that I was never enough,” Kae says. “One Good Reason was my take at challenging falling deeper into that because it just felt like it was a spiral and it was just not getting better. I was really having a hard time dealing with that sadness so I kind of wrote it to say, you know what? It’s easy to go down this path and I can follow this path, but what good would it give me? So, it was kind of just me helping myself through a hard time and finding myself on the other side of it.”
Kae says there has been a good response to the song, adding that it’s one of her favourite songs.
“I love it and I think a lot of people are able to connect to that feeling of like you’re not enough and feeling like you’re drowning in life,” Kae says. “I’ve been noticing that people are saying, ‘You know what, yes, I’ve been there before and I’m glad that there’s a song that I can connect to in that way.’ I find that I’m very grateful to be able to also provide that for somebody else — music is kind of like a safe haven and allows us to explore our feelings and feel a little less alone.”
Kae began her career when she was 12-years-old by touring at local schools and performing at community gatherings in northern Ontario with her father Ron Kanutski.
“I was always involved in music in my household with my dad, he loved music and so I just think that was transferred to me, we were always playing guitar and singing and dancing along to music,” Kae says. “Somewhere along the way, I just felt this connection to it as if it was calling me to explore this world and then it just kind of stuck. It was the one thing that felt consistent and it felt safe and it felt like it cared as much about me as I cared about it, so I just felt as if this was my path into being a part of my community and to helping my community.”
Kae also released her Maadaadizi EP this past October, which was a collection of four songs she wrote in 2024.
“I was determined on getting these songs out because it felt as if for the first time in my writing experience in my career that I was connected to the messages that I wanted to share as a writer and as a person,” Kae says. “I was funded by the Ontario Arts Council and that was my first grant that I received so that was really exciting to have that money and it felt like other people believed in the project as well. Maadaadizi, which means she starts a journey, is just talking about getting to a space where I felt confident enough to actually put money and investment to my career moving forward, and with the help of other people as well.”
Kae plans to tour with her music during the coming year.
“This year, I want to go and do numerous shows,” Kae says. “The tour might not look exactly like how I envision it right now, but I do hope that the journey just takes me to new places that I’ve never played before and meeting new people that I’ve never met before.”
Kae previously performed in Rise with Sara Kae, a 2023 concert series in collaboration with the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra, and she also co-created Trading Places, a musical theatre production. She has also appeared at the Wake the Giant Music Festival in Thunder Bay, headlined her own radio program with Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, and partnered with Susan Aglukark’s Arctic Rose Foundation as a guest artist. She has also worked in the journalism field and received a Canadian Journalism Foundation-CBC Indigenous Journalism Fellowship in 2023 while based in Winnipeg.
