Even as Gilbert Sewell lay on his deathbed, he still found ways to inspire his grandson, Tristan Grant.
Grant, who raps under the alias Wolf Castle, recalls Sewell having a moving moment of clarity, telling Exclaim! the tireless elder — former Chief of the Pabineau First Nation in New Brunswick, and an educator who put on traditional drumming presentations at public schools across the province — suddenly sat up and implored his grandson to fetch his microphone so they could make some music.
Wolf Castle chuckles fondly about warning his grandfather not to try to get out of bed — a moment that inspired the Mi'kmaq MC to shout out Sewell on "Never Letting Go," a mellow but candidly heartfelt back-end track from his uplifting new LP, Waiting for the Dawn (out this Friday, October 18, via Forward Music Group).
As Wolf Castle tells Exclaim!, "He was like: 'Got your microphone here? Let's go!' And we said: 'Don't get up man! Chill out.' He was always trying to do something. He was always working. He wouldn't stop, man. He wouldn't stop."
Wolf Castle calls himself the "spitting image" of his grandfather over the peppy horn sample for the "Never Letting Go" instrumental he produced himself. And much like his grandfather, he takes pride in putting his community first, both in his lyrics and on a new tour where he shares the bill with Saint John MC Stephen Hero (Matthew Elliot), Halifax producer Uncle Fester (Shaun Ryan) and R&B singer Aquakultre (Lance Sampson). On their four-date Better Together tour of the East Coast, the quartet are accepting donations for shelters and food banks such as canned goods, blankets and sweaters.
It's a community-first ethos evident in both their deeds and words — the latter on albums like Waiting for the Dawn and Hero and Fester's newly released LP, The Squeeze.
"I couldn't be more proud to share the stage with these amazing artists, and it's really special to see East Coast hip-hop move like this," says Hero. "There's a lot of different styles represented among us, but we're all aligned with our goals and our ethics. Everyone is just chill and cool. This started with a simple idea, and it's become so much more because of the combined ideas and energy of the people involved, and that's just a beautiful thing to see."
Before this tour, Aquakulture worked to give local musicians a leg up in 2022 by fundraising for a community jam space that would benefit musicians who couldn't afford typical studio fees. Hero, for his part, volunteers by putting on cooking classes for underprivileged youth, has run youth music workshops creating climate action art, and worked on anti-poverty fundraisers and queer protest events.
Meanwhile, on The Squeeze standout "Can't Stop (Working)," Fester pairs fluttering horn samples and thudding percussion at a tempo peppy enough that will inspire listeners to get up, get out and help someone (to paraphrase a similarly thoughtful OutKast classic). On it, Hero and a guesting Aquakulture rhyme about forgoing greed over giving back, empowering labourers and loving our neighbours in a joyous call-and-response. It's a posse cut that will have hip-hop heads drawing enthused parallels to the Illmatic classic "Represent."
Inspiration for the Better Together tour struck while Hero, Fester and Aquakulture were working on "Can't Stop (Working)." Fester says, "We all were collaborating on the song at my studio one early summer day and the idea for the tour really just came out, almost fully formed, in a conversation between the three of us in my backyard. We had Wolf Castle on Zoom within 24 hours to pitch it to him and away we went. Having just played with Wolf Castle during the JUNOS myself, this all just seemed like a natural evolution."
Aquakulture adds that this tour, and its food and clothing drive component, "is a passion and commitment to community, and generational care: providing support for people experiencing housing insecurity and directly supporting the shelters and ground-level organizations who serve them."
Aquakulture — a family man and plumber by trade, whose every waking hour seems dedicated to sweat, love, music and outreach — also points out that Better Together is "my first time going on tour for any consecutive days. I feel like we're going to have a good time because we're all on the same page with the mission and the intent. Feels good, and feels right."
Aquakulture isn't the only Better Together performer guesting on The Squeeze. The ever-wry Wolf Castle is featured on the album's midway heater "Smoke 'Em (If You Got 'Em)," slyly trading wrestling references with Hero as NB-based singer Dee Hernandez's Soulquarians-infused singing sears on the chorus.
But aside from the four MCs forming like Voltron on The Squeeze, there will also be plenty of thematic overlap on the Better Together stage because of their solo lyrics. On "Never Letting Go" Wolf Castle spits about protesting, while Waiting for the Dawn single "It Goes" finds him candidly rhyming about being impoverished, before encouraging his rez brethren to "finesse the system" as the self-assuredly sauntering keys and crackling beat of his instrumental evoke the tempo of a slow, steady grind.
These themes carry over onto The Squeeze: on "The Wax," Hero raps about getting by with a bus pass, before unveiling a vivid lyrical narrative about his high school burger-flipping stint on "Fish Fillet Friday."
Hero stands out among this squad — and from just about any MC — thanks to his fearless viciousness on the mic. On this year's solo single "Cortisol," he vehemently targeted New Brunswick's Progressive Conservative Premiere with a cry of "Fuck Blaine Higgs!" On The Squeeze's "Butter Shrimp," he spits, "Anybody protesting drag should be a bagged corpse." Best of all is his galvanizing line on "Smoke 'Em (If You Got' Em)": "It's time to storm the gates and flip the damn economy."
When asked about soundtracking the uprising, Hero declares, "Class way baby! I'm pretty unapologetic on this stuff. Billionaire oligarchs are a blight on Planet Earth and they should not exist, and the people out here trying to push this agenda to workers that we should protect these billionaires because of some theoretical reality where maybe you could also be rich are being ridiculous."
Hero unearths hard truths that will hopefully not just compel listeners, but also haunt them into fighting for a better tomorrow. This is especially true on "The Wax," where his lyrics turn documentarian as he describes ducking around a corner for a smoke, only to see a "fiend" vomiting on the sidewalk. He admits to feeling "weird" about using the word fiend, "Because it feels kinda derogatory towards people with substance issues, which is something I'm a bit familiar with."
And yet, he couldn't shy away from it, because it "reflects that actual attitude of a person in S.J. having a smoke break and watching someone puke. That phrasing felt the most authentic to the story. My life and the lives of my family members before me are all some version of having smokes between whatever labour work you're doing — it's a type of imagery that I like to paint a lot in my songs because it's true to who I am. And it represents the community of Saint John in a way that I think is accurate and raw."
Wolf Castle is similarly gutsy with his introspective rhymes. That is especially true as he worked on Waiting for the Dawn, grieving not only his grandfather, but also being floored by his twin brother Christopher Grant's schizophrenia diagnosis. Wolf Castle shouts him out on the album, and is continually inspired by Christopher's creative and meaningful coping by posting TikTok videos of his vivid illustrations while describing what living with schizophrenia is like. A gifted illustrator who rarely put his pencil down throughout their childhood, Christopher's arc sparks audible pride in Wolf Castle's voice as he describes how his twin brother garnered 1.5 million followers on TikTok with these videos on his @xoradmagical account.
"He would talk so much about how there are tough aspects of it, but it's his life and it's not all horrifying," Wolf Castle says about his brother being diagnosed with schizophrenia. "It's not all terrible. My family is not going to cast him out, which happens, because it's really hard. Especially when you don't know what's going on, and he doesn't know what's going on, it can get wild. We did our best to help him, and he did most of the work to become stable. Now with his videos, he's de-stigmatizing it."
Wolf Castle needed his own time to heal after an accident on his new skateboard left him with a serious concussion. Bedridden for nearly a month, and being unable to focus his vision or look at screens for the first few days, the MC was thankful that he was still able to hear, as he quickly wrote some songs during that trying time. One of the results: Waiting for the Dawn's "Run It Back," a dark and contemplative sounding song on which Wolf Castle wrestles with the meaning of success in both his career and his personal life, especially after all the turmoil and triumphs of the past few years gave him a newfound sense clarity.
Wolf Castle's insistence on seeking out silver linings, his social outreach in a region of Canada with a seemingly ever-struggling economy, and his musical celebration of his Indigenous heritage despite wrestling with the pressures of being treated like spokesperson for his community — they all feel like a legacy that he seems uniquely qualified for. When his grandfather lay terminally ill, Wolf Castle and his relatives sat by his side and sang his favourite Johnny Cash songs together. His grandfather repeatedly mentioned that he was "waiting for dawn."
He passed away at 4 a.m., just as the sun was coming up, Wolf Castle points out, before explaining: "We're people of the dawn, Mi'kmaq — keepers of the eastern door, because the sun rises in the east. I put a lot of that on this record."
Wolf Castle adds that Gilbert's own "grandfather taught him a lot about the legends of our people. He respected him. And I'm carrying it on."