Francis Baptiste is using music to share his experiences with addiction.
“ I think addiction is something that thrives in secrecy and in stigma,” he said. “If you don’t talk about it, and if you don’t open up about it, then we all end up just kind of suffering in silence.”
The Vancouver musician is getting ready for the release of his upcoming album Lived Experience in East Vancouver.
“I think ultimately most addiction boils down to feeling alone and feeling isolated and depressed and not knowing how to deal with those feelings in a healthy way,” he said. “I try to be honest and hopefully people can relate to that.”
Baptiste says films and books about addiction can present a romanticized notion of rock bottom experiences.
“ I’ve found through myself and through other addicts I know and have worked with that it’s usually like a series of rock bottoms and a series of things that kind of wake you up.”
He says he crashed his car a few times, was arrested a few times, and was hospitalized a few times.
“I had a depressive episode where I spent a couple weeks in Vancouver General Hospital psych ward, and I thought that might be the turning point. And then I crashed my car back home in the Okanagan Valley.”
Baptiste says he was drinking late one night and going to see his brother, he hit a pair of horses on the road in the Osoyoos Indian Band reservation where he grew up.
“It’s not uncommon for people’s loose horses to just be kind of wandering around, and so there’s a couple horses late at night standing on the road on a back road and I hit my car into them and unfortunately killed them both, which I felt terrible about, still feel terrible about, but also almost killed myself in the process.”
“My car got completely flattened by the weight of these two full-grown horses. And I got a very bad concussion. I broke my arm, broke my nose..it was a very kind of close call. And I remember thinking afterwards, like it took a couple weeks from my head to kind of clear up from that because of the concussion. But I remember thinking like that was very close to my son growing up without his father.”
Baptiste says that was “probably the lowest of the several low points.”
“It took still a lot of time after that for me to kind of work on it, but that was kind of the turning point where I knew that I had to get better and I knew that I had to create a different kinda life for us.”
A year after that accident, Baptiste’s first album came out.
“Music has been very therapeutic for me, and very much a way for me to process my emotions, which is good because I’d always used drugs and substances and alcohol to process my emotions my whole life,” he said. “And now I’ve been kind of leaning more on music to do that.”
Baptiste says when he was younger he bought into a narrative about music not being a realistic career.
“It almost like in a way, kind of wasted a decade or more of my life,” he said. “I feel very fortunate to have kind of woken up to this idea that it’s perfectly feasible to have a family, to have a son and a loving partner and be a working musician and play your gigs and collect your cheques and just kind of make it work.”
Listen to the full interview to hear more about Baptiste’s story and his music.
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