Canadian songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie laughs off her ‘icon’ status

TORONTO – If you want to make Buffy Sainte-Marie giggle, call her an icon.

“In a way, I think it’s kind of funny,” she said recently of the oft-used term. “Because success in ‘le showbiz’ anyway, it’s kind of a crapshoot.

“The word icon anyway, what’s an icon? It’s a symbol for something. If you kindly say I’m an icon, (then) an icon for what?

“An icon, you see them on your computer screen every day. Unless you press the button, you don’t know where they lead, right?”

The Saskatchewan-raised Cree singer/songwriter – and decorated owner of an Academy Award, Golden Globe, Juno, Gemini and BAFTA Film Award – sparks different associations for different people, and it’s largely generation-dependent.

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To some, Sainte-Marie will always be the activist folk sage of the 1960s. Others remember her for Sesame Street, or her aboriginal activism, or the timeless composition that merited that Oscar (“Up Where We Belong”, which Sainte-Marie co-wrote for Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes).

Happily for Sainte-Marie, some still associate her with her more current music: 2008’s Juno-winning Running for the Drum and the urgent Power in the Blood, released this week.

There was a seven year break between albums. When did you start working on the new record?

I’m not like a professional writer with professional skills – songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I’m an overgrown kindergarten kid.

I work on songs. That’s stage two. That’s because I went to college.

Sometimes the (listener), they’re just not on your wavelength. They just haven’t had your experiences. You’re trying to give them something they might not want to hear. So you have to be clever.

The art of the three-minute song is more like journalism than writing a big 400-page textbook. You want to be brief, you want to make sense right then and there … and sometimes that takes a little bit of work.

Although the song … might be really hard-edged, you don’t want to give it to them in an enema. You want to give it to them as a gift.

I read that you don’t like being called a “warrior,” though it seems to happen often.

Warrior is one of the words that is quite specific and should be reserved for our veterans and soldiers, who have been or are willing to go kill somebody and get killed – go kill somebody usually because somebody else tells them to.

I’m not going to somebody’s damn war. I don’t want to get killed or be killed for that kind of reason.

When somebody says, “Oh Buffy, you’re such a warrior for peace,” I stop them and say, “No, I’m not really a warrior for peace.” Instead, what I promote is alternative conflict resolution.

The word warrior was not thrown around like that in the ’60s. It’s kind of crept up on us as we’ve forgotten how horrible the Vietnam War was.

For me, both sides are obscene on war. War is just an obsolete, old-fashioned, suicidal thing that human beings have done from time to time. It’s a low vibe. We’re better than that.

Are you proud that your album Illuminations was so far ahead of its time for electronic music?

(That) came out in the damn ’60s! You weren’t supposed to do electronic music. Folk music just went (holding her nose)  “Pewww, that doesn’t sound like folk music!” Electronic music students and art students loved it immediately. But the only place I could go with it was music scoring.

I was first using a Macintosh computer before anybody wanted to know about computers – that’s pie charts and taxes to people then, in the ’80s. Nobody was making electronic paintings that would end up in museums in the ’80s.

Being that early doesn’t make me so much proud as it makes me happy. It’s kind of a dream come true to see other artists able to access these great tools.