Don Amero is not just a musician; he is a fixture in the Canadian cultural consciousness. As a First Nations icon, he carries a weight that most singer-songwriters in the country-pop circuit simply do not have to contend with. I am sitting here looking at the cover of his latest EP, *Nothing is Meaningless*, and it strikes me how much his aesthetic has shifted. The folk-tinged softness of his earlier work has been replaced by a more assertive, polished country veneer that feels less like a costume and more like a homecoming.
Amero is, by all accounts, the industry’s quintessential gentleman. But do not let the polite exterior fool you. There is a sharp, intentional edge to his creative choices these days. The new EP is a masterclass in navigating the tension between spiritual philosophy and the gritty realities of the Nashville-style radio machine.
The title itself, *Nothing is Meaningless*, sounds like a double negative designed to make you pause. It is a direct pull from a high-concept art project that forced Amero to look at ancient texts through a modern lens.
“It is called *Nothing is Meaningless*,” Amero says. “It is a funny title. People often ask me about that one. And that came out of a project I was involved with, an artist collective, and we were all asked to create different pieces of art around some biblical scripture, the first three chapters of Ecclesiastes. And so funny enough, I wrote this song called ‘Nothing is Meaningless’, which is really the opposite as everything has meaning. I just love this song so much, and that is how it ended up on the EP.”
The track serves as the emotional anchor for the project. In an era where existential dread is practically a secondary currency, Amero leans into a defiant optimism. It is a risky move in a genre that often rewards heartbreak and beer-soaked nihilism.
“And for me, I feel like I am always the glass is half full kind of guy and always looking at life with opportunities and possibilities,” Amero explains. “So I thought I’d try to share that in a song like ‘Nothing is Meaningless’. After I wrote this song, I thought that is a really great name for the title of this EP too, especially given the times that we are in. I think we are always looking for meaning in stuff. And maybe this is a bit of a reminder that it all means something, I think, if we are looking for it.”
But if the title track is the soul, “My Poor Mama” is the muscle. From the first bar, the guitar tone is filthy. It is the kind of mid-frequency growl that suggests the amp might actually be on fire. It is a departure for Amero, a man usually associated with cleaner, acoustic arrangements.
The song has a pedigree, too. It was penned by Corey Crowder, a Nashville heavyweight who knows exactly how to engineer a hook for maximum impact. Amero’s manager, Mike Denney, saw the potential for a Canadian takeover of the track.
“Well, you know what? This is an interesting song because it was actually released already by one of the writers, Corey Crowder, who is one of the top writers in Nashville right now,” Amero says. “Corey is an artist as well, so he put this song on a couple years ago, down in the United States. My manager, Mike Denney, loved this song and thought, why wasn’t it ever released up here in Canada? He came to me and said, ‘Hey, would you want to put this one up here?’”
Initially, Amero was hesitant. The song’s narrative of a rebellious son putting his mother through hell did not immediately square with his "good guy" reputation.
“And I said, ‘Yeah, for sure.’ And so we thought about it for a bit,” Amero admits. “And actually, I didn’t say, ‘Yeah, for sure.’ I first said, ‘I’m not sure. I don’t really know where this fits into my story.’ And then after hearing it, I was like, ‘Wait a second,’ because ‘My Poor Mama’ is all about putting your mama through the ringer. And if you had my mom on here right now, she would say, ‘Don was an angel.’ But the truth of it is, my brother was really the devil on her back sometimes.”
This realization turned the track into a family affair. Amero brought his brother into the fold, adding a layer of authenticity that the original version lacked.
“And so I thought about it. I was like, ‘Wait, this is really about him and mom.’ And so I reached out to my brother and I said, ‘Hey, would you like to be part of this song?’ He’s a guitar player. And he said, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Amero says. “So he actually came in and recorded this solo on this song, and he is actually going to be appearing in the music video with me as well. So it is the first time as brothers working together and yes, it is a bit of a family affair.”
The technical brilliance of the track, however, comes from Danick Dupelle. As the guitarist for Emerson Drive, Dupelle knows how to balance commercial polish with raw energy.
“But the guitar stuff, to be honest, that’s Danick Dupelle, guitar player from Emerson Drive and producer extraordinaire here from Canada and working down in Nashville as well,” Amero notes. “He is a monster on the guitar and really put some cool riffs down for this track for sure.”
Then there is the matter of "You Can’t Always be 21". This is the track that earned Amero his first "Explicit" tag. For a man who avoids profanity as a rule, the inclusion of a certain four-letter word was a significant hurdle.
“It is the very first time I’ve ever sworn in a song,” Amero says. “Anybody that knows Don Amero, knows I don’t swear. But the line in that one is, ‘Now’s the time to get your shit together.’ At first, I struggled with it because I thought, oh man, I’ve never had a little E beside my name before in one of my songs. And I thought, why didn’t they just say something else? Why didn’t they say, ‘Get your stuff together,’ because universal radio can play it without any issues.”
Ultimately, the choice came down to artistic truth versus radio-friendly convenience. In the end, the grit won out, though a clean version was recorded for the more sensitive airwaves.
“And then as I thought about it more and more, I realized, wait a second, there is no better line that really emphasizes where you are at,” Amero explains. “And if you don’t have your stuff together, you would say, ‘Get your shit together.’ And so that is why it stuck for me. But we knew also radio wouldn’t play it because of the swear word, so we had to make a clean version as well.”
This willingness to edit and adapt is a recurring theme in Amero’s process. He is a collaborator who respects the craft of songwriting, but he is also a man of firm ethical convictions. This was particularly evident during the production of the track "Let You".
“It’s always a level of respect. I have to go back to the writers,” Amero says. “There’s another one on this album called ‘Let You’, where I felt like in the chorus, there was a line in there that just didn’t sit right with me. And so the chorus goes... Now, I’m trying to remember what it was. There’s a line that was said. It’s about a two people meeting one night, and then they were really into each other. And one of them says to the other like, ‘I swear, I won’t hit the brakes.’ Kind of like saying, ‘If I tell you we’re going to go all the way, we’re going to go all the way.’ But in some way I struggle with that because it was like, well, no, in this day and age, it’s never okay. If somebody ever wants to say, ‘I’m calling it quits. I’m saying done. We got to stop,’ whatever, I want people to feel comfortable to say that.”
Amero’s insistence on changing the line to "I don't want to hit the brakes" reflects a modern sensitivity to consent and the #MeToo movement that is often missing from the "bro-country" tropes that dominate the charts.
I think the majority of listeners nowadays aren’t genre specific. They’re listening to songs that’s going to move them. To me, I’m less genre specific as a listener too, because I want to listen to music that’s going to move me, and that’s all over the map in terms of genres.
“So I went back to the writers and I said, ‘I can’t sing the line, “I swear I won’t hit the brakes.” But just change it to, “I don’t want to hit the brakes,” as in like “I’m in total control of myself.”’ It was just more like, with the #MeToo movement and people feeling control of their own bodies and all those things. So I went back to the writers and I said, ‘Can I change this lyric?’ And they all talked among themselves, and they understood my logic behind changing the lyrics. So it really is a sign of respect for the writers because they work really hard basically, sometimes on word by word. They really put a lot of effort in that. So it is really a level of respect.”
The EP also features "I Hate That Song", a title that suggests a petty grievance but reveals a deep emotional vulnerability. It was inspired by the work of fellow Canadian artist Jessica Mitchell, whose ability to excavate pain is legendary.
“Well, it is funny because I wrote this one, I’m going to go maybe say three or four years ago,” Amero says. “I was up late, and I can’t even remember the song. I was listening to Jessica Mitchell’s album from a couple years ago, and Jessica Mitchell’s a fantastic artist and just an incredible singer. And she gets you right in all the good feels, well actually all the sad feels. A lot of the times I am listening to her songs, and I am heartbroken by them. And I remember listening to it and I said, ‘I hate that song,’ not meaning I hate it. I love this song, but what it caused in me, all the emotions and all the feelings of longing and pain and loneliness.”
Watching Amero’s trajectory from the folk-roots scene to the country mainstream has been fascinating. It is a path many have tried, but few have navigated with such apparent ease. For Amero, the shift was less about a rebranding and more about honouring his lineage.
“I always say that it was a bit of a natural progression for me,” he says. “It was never anything I felt like I forced. I come by it honestly. My dad was a bluegrass guitar player, my mom a country singer and still is. She still loves singing country. And I think back when I was a kid, they really had this desire to do something with their music. But they never did get it off the ground because they had us so young and just priorities shift and change. And you can’t be the musician you want to be when you have kids when they were kids themselves. They were just teenagers.”
Amero’s sound is now a hybrid, a blend of the organic storytelling of his youth and the high-production demands of the modern era.
“And so for me, I first of all started to learn and play guitar,” Amero continues. “I think even country songs, when you strip them down, can have a bit of that folk and roots kind of feel. And so for me, it was just again a natural evolution. Once you get the band together, songs start feeling a little more country. Honestly it all just lent itself to me putting my foot more in the world of country music. Then it landed me the record deal with MDM when I had an opportunity to perform Church at the Country Music Awards a couple years ago. Mike loved what I did, and it just started this whole trajectory more and more and solidifying my position as a country artist. But I often say when people say, ‘What are you?’ I say, ‘I’m roots, country, pop, soul, funk.’ It is a little bit of everything in there. It is all influenced that.”
He is also acutely aware that the modern listener does not care about the silos that the industry tries to build.
“And I think the majority of listeners nowadays aren’t genre specific,” Amero says. “They are listening to songs that is going to move them. To me, I’m less genre specific as a listener too, because I want to listen to music that is going to move me, and that is all over the map in terms of genres.”
This refusal to be boxed in mirrors the journey of artists like Crystal Shawanda, who famously pivoted from country to blues. Amero sees his own evolution as an ongoing process of self-discovery.
“Yeah, at the end of the day, I’m less concerned about writing songs that fit into some mold and more about how can I be my truest self and bring that to the table and still feel like I’m putting good quality art out there and blending all the things that I’ve learned that make me who I am up until now,” Amero says. “And I hope I’m far from the best version of me as I keep building and growing as a person, as an adult, and as a father, as a husband, all those things. They’d all lend themselves to the evolution of me.”
He hints that the country sound might not be his final destination.
“There’s no better way for me to say that. I keep saying that, but that’s really what it is,” Amero notes. “I venture to guess that one day there may be a soul record that comes out that I put together. All these influences are in there, and they’re all part of me. I’m more about, again, like I say, just music that is going to move you. And if it moves me, I’m not so concerned with the genre.”
The EP is bolstered by some savvy collaborations, including Rhianna Rae Saj and Raquel Cole. These were not calculated label pairings, but organic studio moments.
“That’s funny, because Rhianna sings on ‘I Hate That Song’,” Amero says. “I didn’t intend for it to be a duet. I wrote it just as me and my guitar, and I said that’s how it was going to sit. And then I was talking with my producer friend, Roman Clarke, who’s a fantastic musician, too. And he said, ‘I think you need a woman’s voice on here.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, who do you have in mind?’ And he said, ‘Rhianna is coming into the studio tomorrow. Maybe I can ask her.’ And I’ve heard of Rhianna’s name. I never met her officially. But I said, ‘Yeah, let’s see how it sounds.’ And he sent me back what she did, and I loved it immediately. And we’ve since met and had a chance to sing that song live together, and she is fantastic. She is also a local Winnipeg artist.”
The Raquel Cole feature on "Let You" was equally seamless.
“Raquel Cole and I both work with Danick Dupelle,” Amero explains. “So as we were putting ‘Let You’ together, because ‘Let You’ was initially a duet to begin with, so we knew we needed to find somebody else. And Raquel is an incredible artist and somebody I have much admiration and respect for. So when Danick said, ‘What about bringing in Raquel?’ I was like, ‘Absolutely.’ I love what she is doing. And we came up together in the last little while through the Top of the Country program, and now she is the top three finalist, well deserved. And we snagged her for this duet before she got too famous.”
Identity is the undercurrent of everything Amero does. As a man of Cree and Metis heritage, his music is inextricably linked to his history, though it took time for him to fully claim that space.
“It is interesting because I didn’t always know that about myself,” Amero admits. “And that is one of those things I learned along the way as a young man and looking at my roots and trying to figure out who I was. Sometimes in order to figure out who you are, you got to know where you came from. It took some soul searching, but that is a major part of who I am. I recognize that I have an opportunity to change minds and hearts and get on the front lines of being able to give people an example of what it is to be an indigenous person in the music world. And none of us look the same. Everybody’s different, and we all come to the table and have different offerings. So for me, it is a major part of who I am and a big part of what I want to share with audiences.”
This commitment to his identity was put to the ultimate test in 2021. Following the devastating discovery of the 215 residential school children, Amero was scheduled to sing the national anthem. It was a moment fraught with tension and grief.
“I’ll be honest with you. That was a trying time, because of a number of different fronts, one, the uncovering of these children who the indigenous community has been claiming for a long, long time,” Amero says. “And so carrying the weight of that and also knowing that the whole country was now wrestling with the realities of this and a country that, to proudly sing a national anthem was really hard for me. I often say that I’m not a Canadian that is ashamed of who we are. There is some shame about this country’s past that I think many of us are wrestling with and grappling with. But I’m not ashamed of the work we’re doing. I think there’s a lot of really good things. And so I thought, you know what? I can get up on stage and sing an anthem in a particular way. And so I got up, and essentially all I did was slow it down and I gave each word its moment in a sense.”
The performance was haunting. By stripping the anthem of its usual bombast, Amero forced the audience to actually listen to the words.
“I really wanted the listeners to digest what the song said,” Amero explains. “Because I think so many of us sing this song without really thinking about the lyric and don’t really think about what it means, because most of us have been singing it since we were in kindergarten without much thought. And so that was my whole intention there.”
Since that day, Amero’s relationship with the anthem has changed permanently. He has set a personal mandate that links his performance to tangible social justice.
“Since then, I’ve been asked to sing the anthem a couple of times,” Amero reveals. “And I’ve personally made the commitment that I will not sing the anthem the normal way until everybody in Canada has clean drinking water, and that is just a personal thing I’ve set that I want to see action in place for more justice and more equality. I think that is for me, one of the markers of being able to say I can sing this anthem in an anthemic way. That is nothing to say or to take away from anybody who does sing the anthem. My kids and I, they go to school and they sing the anthem. I told them, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you guys in the anthem.’ Truth be told, I would be at an arena and I would probably sing along in the normal way. But in order for me to lead the people through an anthem, I don’t personally feel the anthem resides in me that way anymore.”
His decision to perform rather than boycott was a deliberate move toward reconciliation rather than division.
“We can find peace. We can find our way to reconciliation peacefully,” Amero says. “We did wrestle with it, the idea of not singing the anthem and taking a knee and just bowing my head and maybe not even being there at all. All those things felt divisive to us. And we just said, if anything, this country needs unity now more than ever. Not singing the anthem to me felt like it wasn’t unity.”
The performance sparked the exact conversations Amero hoped it would.
“The other thing was, a number of people did feel challenged by it. And a number of people said, ‘I wish you didn’t sing the anthem.’ And I said, ‘That gave me opportunity to have conversation personally with them.’ So a few people that came up to me and said, ‘Hey, I struggle with the way you sang the anthem.’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s talk about that. What made you struggle?’ It really opened up doorways to have those deeper conversations. So for me, it was really just about a conversation piece, allowing people to think deeper about the lyrics, but also hopefully spurring them on to have deeper conversations with their circle around them.”
Amero’s songwriting is deeply informed by the Seven Sacred Teachings, even if his upbringing was more urban than traditional.
“That’s a good question. I get asked that now and again,” Amero says. “So for me, I think I was alluding to this earlier, I didn’t grow up with much indigenous roots. I grew up as a city guy. My dad’s from Nova Scotia. So I have East Coast Acadian-European descent, and my mom is the Cree and Metis side. And for me, it was like, I felt like I didn’t really know what my identity was. As I got older and began to do this work and search on who I was in my past or who our family is, I recognized that the indigenous roots. And I’ve always felt more of a connection there.”
He views these teachings as the DNA of his artistic output.
“For me, the big connection is through the seven teachings,” Amero explains. “The Seven Sacred Teachings are, love, courage, honour, wisdom, humility, truth. There’s one other one I’m missing. But all those things, I believe, are part of my DNA, and they all shine through in my music and in my stories. I think anybody follows the thread of Don Amero’s career, I believe you can point out all those things in the journey.”
Advocacy is not a side project for Amero; it is the point of the project.
“I think I’ve been really gifted with an opportunity to have a voice that people, not all people, but some people listen to,” Amero says. “And I think that people are receptive to what I have to share. So I feel like with that comes a responsibility to, again, take people on the deeper journey and hopefully inspire and encourage others to do good things themselves in the world around them. And I think the only way I can do that is by sharing my heart and what is important to me and not just the surface stuff. I think it is okay to get together and have a good time. It is okay to want to have fun. But really my whole thing is like, how can we continue to make your life better? How can we continue to make the world better by the works that we do? And so that’s been my whole thing really, as I said it before, unity, create more space for that. And just allowing people to really grow and at least give them my ideas of how to grow, and that’s the best I could do.”
This philosophy extends to his "Music is Medicine" workshops, where he explores the intersection of art and biology.
“Music is Medicine, that’s a workshop I started a number of years ago. I want to say four or five years ago,” Amero says. “Honestly, that started with curiosity for me. I started looking around to find out what is actually happening on a biological level in our bodies, when we listen to music. I started basically calling all this research that other people did the hard work on, and I would just put their words together in a presentation and make it a bit of my own and share some examples of what music is doing for me, and share scientifically what’s happening.”
It is a presentation that manages to be both academic and deeply personal.
“Maybe it sounds boring, but really in the context of the way that I share it through songs, through stories, through videos, it gives people a deeper understanding that then music that we listen to actually has a deep physiological effect on us, and it is moving us in really incredible ways,” Amero explains. “But I don’t think many of us stop to consider what’s happening when we listen to music in that way. When we administer the music as medicine, it is really quite cool.”
For Amero, music is the soundtrack to the mundane and the monumental alike.
“I’m an avid listener to a lot of different kinds of music, and it all blends in differently in my day, depending on what is going on. For me, I consider that medicine, depending on what I’m doing,” Amero says. “When I’m cooking, it is different to what I’m listening to when I’m walking. And all that adds up, giving me a better experience overall in whatever it is that I’m doing. My hope is just sharing a bit of that side of music, and getting people to think a little bit deeper about the music that we are listening to.”
*Nothing is Meaningless* is available now. If you are looking for a record that balances Nashville sheen with a soul that is purely Canadian, this is it. Go to DonAmero.ca to check out tour dates, music and more.
