Singer-songwriter Haleluya Hailu flows between instruments and embraces her pop side at Vines Art Festival
Scoring a deal with 604 Records is just the latest step for a rising star who hits the stage at the Trout Lake celebration
Haleluya Hailu has come a long way from playing the ukulele in her first talent show.
Photos by Simone Chnarkas (WURLD2000k)
Haleluya Hailu performs at Flowing Upstream, at Trout Lake on August 19 at 6:40 pm as part of the VInes Art Festival; park festivities start at 1 pm
A FAST-RISING LOCAL star, 20-year-old musician Haleluya Hailu is taking the stage at Vines Art Festival on August 19 as part of its big, closing Flowing Upstream celebration at Trout Lake.
Since she released her debut EP Greetings and Salutations in 2021, Hailu’s music career has grown rapidly. She’s played dozens of gigs across Vancouver and scored herself a record deal with 604 Records. The artist describes her musical style as “Black girl indie sleaze”—creating fun, danceable alt-pop tunes that have gained popularity in Vancouver’s youth music scene.
Hailu’s musical journey began at the age of 14, when she sang and played ukulele in a school-district talent show. She won first place, her talent recognizable from the beginning.
“It was crazy because I had never really performed,” Hailu recalls in a phone interview with Stir. “I was this tiny little 14-year-old in this giant school-district talent show. It reaffirmed that music was something that I love doing, that I'm not the only person that thinks I'm good at this.”
She continued to pursue music throughout high school, and her success inspired her to attend Selkirk College’s music program, during which she released her self-produced EP.
“I recorded that EP in my friend's bedroom studio,” Hailu says of Greetings and Salutations. “It had really fun, DIY, Covid energy.
“That album was mostly top lining, which is when somebody sends you a beat and you write on top of it,” she continues. “The two songs I produced were the only ones that I didn't do with that writing process. I did a song on that EP called ‘Jewels’, where I sampled random sounds from around my day-to-day life.”
During her time at music school, Hailu says she grew the confidence to start composing her own instrumentals and experimenting with different musical styles.
“I think the coolest part of the experience is that I play a lot of other instruments, but I wasn't very confident in it,” Hailu says of her college program. “It probably has to do with the amount of misogyny that I dealt with at music school. Being around the women that I went to school with empowered me, and I was like, I am good at these other instruments. I'm not gonna let these random dudes talk down to me.
“Nowadays, I love writing with other people,” she adds. “I think that's the best way to become a good writer, is learning how to write with another person in the room and taking live feedback and criticism and playing off of somebody.”
Now signed to 604 Records, Hailu has a new album in the works. Last month, she released “USELESS”, her first single under the label, an assertive acoustic-pop song that tells of a toxic friendship.
“I think people need to just chill out. Pop music is the coolest kind of music ever,” Hailu jokes of her musical style. “I think all artists think they're too special to pick a genre of music.
“When I first went into music, I wanted to write purely pop music,” she adds. “It took going to music school and playing out loud with other people for me to realize, ‘Yeah, I love pop music, and the whole thing with pop music is that it's meant for easy consumption.’”
This month, Hailu is stepping onto the Vines stage for the second time after performing at last year’s festival.
“Vines is very different,” Hailu says. “It's a festival that stands for a lot of things that I stand for. We are constantly losing arts and music spaces in this city, and it hurts a little bit, especially because it feels like it's those spaces that support women of colour and QTBIPOC folks.
“There's not a lot of spaces where styles of art like that can flourish,” she continues. “I feel like in Vancouver, where everything is so expensive, sometimes I can get lost in the need to be able to make enough money from my art to pay my rent, and because of that, I feel like a lot of cool, creative, funky art gets lost. I'm really happy that Vines supports that.”
Hailu (and the fake friends) join a roster that spans Kitty Guerin, Morning Star Trickey, and SoyJoy on the fest’s main outdoor concert stage; elsewhere roaming performers and art installations explore Vines’ core themes of land, water, and relational justice in wildly creative ways around the park.
“Making sure festivals like Vines stay around and are accessible is a really important thing to me,” she concludes. “I'm a huge supporter of that. I've been doing my best to do more work in creating better venue spaces in the city.”
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