Francis Baptiste hopes his new album helps break down the stigma around addiction

If you visit Francis Baptiste’s website, the first thing you’ll notice is the harsh way he describes himself as “a washed-up, divorced, recovering alcoholic and drug addict” who “tries to balance being a single father and a middle-aged musician, living under the poverty line in East Vancouver.” Baptiste says the description is a little “tongue-in-cheek” but also the reality of the life he has lived for the last decade. “I always try to aim to be as candid and as open and honest and vulnerable as I possibly can be. I think vulnerability is such an important quality in art and for artists to have to truthfully convey their story and their message,” says Baptiste on the latest episode of Face to Face. “That’s really all I try to bring with my art is to create some relatability for other people who have had similar struggles as myself. Whether you’re an addict, whether you have struggled with alcohol or drug addiction or whether you’ve been a single father or single parent, it can be very difficult and living in an expensive city and living far away from my community, the Osoyoos Indian Band in the south Okanagan, all of these struggles I think make me more human and hopefully make me relatable to anyone else who has had these individual struggles themselves.” Baptiste’s latest album, Lived Experience in East Vancouver, was released on Oct. 24. It’s his third full length and one he is particularly proud of. One of his goals with the new music is to break down the stigma around addiction. “I work in the Downtown Eastside and I’m surrounded by people who are in various degrees of recovery, all the time. And as I mentioned before, I’ve struggled with addiction my whole life and one of the things that kind of makes it harder is the lack of empathy that a lot of addicts face,” says Baptiste. “There’s these preconceptions that if you’re an addict, if you’re addicted to drugs or alcohol, that you’re just a lazier person or that you’re just a weaker willed individual, that you just don’t have that fight in you but a lot of the struggle that us addicts face, it’s beneath the surface, it’s like an invisible struggle that you have every day,” he adds. Baptiste believes there is no easy solution to overcoming addiction. “Honestly, I think it’s just consistency of wanting to get better. A lot of people will say there’s a moment, the low point or I hit rock bottom and everything changed and that’s kind of a Hollywood narrative of how addiction works. “The truth is there’s a lot of rock bottoms and it’s not like a straight line, it’s up and down and up and down. It takes consistent, daily work for years before things gradually start clicking and you get this compound effect were you see the benefits versus the harms of it,” he says. Baptiste has only been releasing music since 2022. His debut album, Sneqsilx Family, featured songs sung in his native language Nsyilxcən, the endangered language of the Syilx  people. The album was released shortly after his divorce, when he says the whole life trajectory he had mapped out was swept away. Baptiste started reconnecting with his family, language and culture around the same time. He credits the First People’s Cultural Council with providing the grants that have enabled him to record and release all three of his albums. Continue Reading