Luca Fogale | Artist of the Month

This rare mix of skill and restraint is why Fogale — who released his fourth album, Challenger, on this past January — has a pair of JUNO Adult Contemporary Album of the Year nominations (for 2023’s Run When the Light Calls and 2020’s Nothing Is Lost) and has garnered more than 180 million streams. For every song that’s made the cut for release, there are dozens more that the masses will probably never hear—he’s very adamant about not releasing songs unless they add value to the world.

Challenger, like its predecessors, doubles as an emotional sanctuary. But unlike those releases, there’s now an edge: here Fogale, who produced the album himself, is grappling with generational patterns, with apathy, with masculine ideals, with social tumult. His is a practical, “go through it to get through it” realization. “There is a lot to be cynical about in this world,” he says. “But I’m trying hard to oscillate to the other side of that — towards trust, towards hopefulness.”

This is how the album’s first single, “Begin” — a contemplation about fighting apathy and starting over — can coexist organically with “Horizon.” An unabashed love song, the latter swells into a bright chorus capturing, he says, “the feeling when you surrender to something.” It’s a fraternal twin to the more sentimental hymn “Lost Without You,” an expression of gratitude for the security love brings.

Fogale was raised Catholic outside Vancouver, where he still lives. He subsequently learned to play the piano and guitar, which, by his early 20s, became his gospel instead. “My focus, instead of turning to God, was turned inwards; towards a reverence for the human spirit and for this world, and towards a deep exploration of self. In this shift,” he explains, “I have found the depth of gratitude, peace, and faith that I believe I was always looking for.”

To nurture these ruminations, Fogale wrote the songs “mostly in quiet moments between being on the road.” In particular, he’d drive a few hours out of the city to a cabin ensconced deep in the interior of British Columbia. “It’s very small and on a quiet lake, with a wood stove and a garden. Somewhere to reflect.”

There, while writing Challenger, he faced his doubts with courage and even wonder. “This album was born out of questioning who I have become and what has shaped me, and in turn, considering how much of my past is no longer serving me — how much I can challenge, and how much I can let go of,” he says. “The more time I spend engaging with this life, the wider my lens for the world gets. It requires me to reflect on myself and hold myself accountable for who I am. It raises the bar for who I want to be.”

Much of Challenger is a checklist confronting anything that may nudge him off that path. The Americana-folk “Ashes,” for instance, dismantles conventions around masculinity. Reflecting on a friend who passed away, the song grants us permission to feel: “That was the first time in a very long time that I remember crying,” says Fogale, who grew up in a household that raised strong-but-silent type men. Meanwhile, the harmonic simplicity of “Daniel’s Theme” is, he says, “about an archetype of any man who’s been beaten by his past, but his kindness has persisted. Daniel is slow and soft and tormented and tempted, and in spite of all that he has been through,  everyone’s champion.” The track is a significant one — it’s been percolating in Fogale’s consciousness for five full years.

Whenever he needs to clear his mind, Fogale sits at his piano. Sometimes, he doesn’t even play it. “It’s a place where I feel most at peace,” he says. “I feel as though the world sort of stops there, like its own little universe.”

He used to think this was a place for divine inspiration, but if the Challenger process taught him anything, it’s that his most compelling work comes from all-too-human introspection. “For a long time I considered songwriting as a channeling of the cosmos — of extrinsic influence — as though ideas were merely flowing through us,” he says. “But the older I get the more I’ve come to firmly plant my flag in the belief that all of this artistic expression comes from deep within us, and are the parts of ourselves that are either the most ready or the most needed for this world.”