Aquakultre releases new album 1783

Aquakultre releases new album 1783 

Award-winning Halifax singer, rapper, composer and storyteller Aquakultre aka Lance Sampson releases his highly anticipated fourth studio album, 1783 via Next Door Records. The new 17-track soul, R&B, gospel and folk-fuelled album produced by two-time Music Nova Scotia "Producer of the Year" Erin Costelo, mixed by Grammy-winner Qmillion (Robert Glasper) and mastered by world-renowned multi-Grammy nominee Chris Athens (Drake), follows on the heels of his critically-acclaimed 2023 Polaris Music Prize longlisted album Don’t Trip, his second album to land on the longlist. The former CBC Music Searchlight competition winner who has released his best and most complete album to date, also drops some new visuals for the song "I'll Be Damned", rooted in reflective Black Nova Scotian storytelling, and influenced by his lineage. 

 

"This song is inspired by my uncle Derek Johnson who grew up in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. He was the black sheep of the family, he got into a lot of shit," explains Aquakultre. "He didn’t play with nobody. As soon as he could, he got out of the country. Like a lot of these folks that left these rural areas, they came to the city and got themselves into trouble. My uncle came into the city and married a lady named Joan Brooks. They married real young. They had a lot of kids and did their best to raise them but my uncle was dealing with what happened to him, racism and abuse. He didn’t know how to love a woman. He didn’t know how to raise kids. His image was of his dad - my grandfather - who was an evil dude. Even though I grew up in the city, I’m recognizing that a lot of my family and my ancestors were born and raised in rural Black areas of Nova Scotia, like Liverpool and Weymouth Falls. I wanted to recognize the relationship that my uncle had to his place of birth. This song was me trying to write the story of my uncle coming through and trying to make a life for himself, and the parallels with my own life. This could be anyone’s story, but it started with my uncle, and then with me meeting my wife Julia and us having our two children Georgina and Jamel. As someone who really had to put their best foot forward and be held accountable and try to connect, and seeing that relationship has made me who I am today. I’ll be damned." 

1783