Buffy Sainte-Marie is a Canadian singer-songwriter who burst onto the Canadian music scene in the early 1970s and went on to have a prolific run as a member of a trio called Els (women who sing on guitar). Sainte-Marie’s songs have been covered by everyone from Brian Wilson to Fleetwood Mac, with her work adopted in the recent Netflix film I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, starring Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart. In 2010, she released the album Without: 18 Songs and Other Stories, an attempt to write songs about why she doesn’t feel home in her life, or in Canada. Originally a vocal artist, Sainte-Marie joined the side project Els in 1971 and embarked on a solo career in 1975 that would continue for more than five decades.
Sainte-Marie spoke to The Art of Doing, the Times’s brand strategy team, by email about her days of scrambling for accommodation, begging friends for guest quarters, and how she managed to survive as a single woman artist in a country notorious for sexism.
Read the entire interview here.