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The little one-liners that became hooks for her classic rock-influenced pop songs are inspired by things she’s overheard in her hometown of Reserve Mines on Cape Breton Island. After spending most of the 2010s modelling in Paris, Boutilier decided in 2022 she needed to make a big change to reach the next stage of her career.

“To move back in with my family, like literally in my basement, it doesn’t feel like you’re on the right path at all” — but it was what she needed to do.

“I just knew that if I wanted to kind of give music everything I had, I would need to put all my focus into this,” she said.

Going back home again helped her achieve the complete focus she was looking for, leading to three spectacular, independently released extended plays in the past three years. So what about Cape Breton Island, just off the coast of Nova Scotia, allowed for that clarity?

Listening to her parents, the wisdom of locals and line dancing with her friends in the legion halls, Boutilier said.

Another one of her singles, “The Angel and the Saint,” was inspired by a conversation with her mother.

“I was saying to my mom, like, ‘I’m such an angel.’ And she was like, ‘You’re no saint.’ And that was that.”

This authenticity has propelled Boutilier into the mainstream as an independent artist. Her streaming numbers are now in the millions, and she’s been on five Spotify billboards in pc28����and one in Times Square. Following the success of her albums, Boutilier opened for fellow Canadian Orville Peck on a leg of his summer tour, then embarked on her first headlining tour, performing 14 shows in cities across Canada and the United States.

To kick off 2025, Boutilier will head out on her first European headlining tour, which starts in February. She also spent the last months of 2024 working on new music and a new single is on the way, releasing March 5.

Until last summer, it had been a decade since Boutilier had been on tour. She said she didn’t tell anyone on her touring team that,  so she wouldn’t scare them with her lack of experience.

Still, this isn’t Boutilier’s  first rodeo. Goldie is actually the third stage name of Kristin Kathleen Boutilier.

She grew up wanting to be a performer and moved to Victoria, B.C., at 17 to make her own music. She handed out self-made CDs at clubs, sang in a girl group called Ladies Take Control and uploaded videos of herself singing on YouTube, because she knew that’s how Justin Bieber got discovered.

The videos worked. At 20, Boutilier was noticed by Ryan Tedder of the band OneRepublic. He helped her secure a record deal with Interscope and she moved to Los Angeles. From there, her career “moved in reverse,” she said.

The record label put her up in a nice place and paired her with producers, including Tedder, to write a record. She released songs with artists of the moment Cobra Starship and Steve Aoki, but her album was shelved and it took two years to get her music released.

Her first record, released in 2012 under the alias “My Name Is Kay” (also the name of her single and album), was a modest hit in Canada, but it didn’t do as well as Interscope wanted, she said.

Boutilier was happy with the output at the time, likening it to walking before you can run.

“But for the label and everyone around me, it felt like a massive failure,” she said.

Next, she went out on tour with Hedley, who were at the peak of their popularity. When she got back to L.A., she found her label not only had no concrete plans for her future music, staff didn’t even recognize her when she went into their offices.

Still, she persisted.

She started to work with new producers, trying to figure out her sound. But by then, everyone had heard of her and the people she was working with were getting “progressively less cool,” she said, as she was cycled through 50 producers. Interscope dropped her in 2013 and the producer she was working with at the time suggested she become an escort.

“I was going to the studio and still trying to make my dream come true. And then, it became less about music after a while.”

Boutilier speaks at length about this period in her life in her short documentary “Emerald Year,” which works as a companion piece to her EP of the same name.

After seven years in Los Angeles, she moved to Paris in 2014, changed her stage name to Goldilox and started to put out music independently with her friend, the DJ and producer G Doubet.

The music they made, including the 2018 album “Very Best,” is inspired by Studio 54 and is one part disco, one part hyperpop. The standout song is “Sex Paranoia,” a hard-hitting bass-forward pop anthem with a music video that features her dressed in lingerie, striking poses while spinning on a platform surrounded by mirrors, staring past the camera like Patricia Arquette in “Lost Highway.”

She enlisted the help of choreographer Wynn Holmes on this and many other of her music videos. Boutilier isn’t a dancer by trade, and she found Holmes understood that and knew how to craft Boutilier’s natural movements into the ways she wanted to move in her videos.

“What’s so just fantastic about her is she’s like 100 per cent in everything that she does,” Holmes said. “She works so hard and she’s got this immense performer in her.”

Holmes and Boutilier still work together. When Boutilier decided to go by Goldie and return to her roots, she was able to really find and then be herself, Holmes said.

That involved being vulnerable about her life and experiences in her writing, and “bungee jumping emotionally,” Boutilier said.

“I’ll try to shock myself, which is pretty hard. If I can make myself uncomfortable, like, I feel like I’m on the right path.”

As Goldie Boutilier, the artist is at her most self-actualized, pulling references from film, music and fashion throughout the past 100 years to weave into her music, videos and visual presentations that are the realization of the elaborate visions she wants to create.

For the “Cowboy Gangster Politician” video, Boutilier asked Holmes to help her channel the dancer Ann-Margret in the 1964 film “Viva Las Vegas,” whom Boutilier felt she could emulate, and the pair created the first fully choreographed dance number Boutilier had ever learned. Still, Boutilier ended up winging most of it on the day of filming, based on what she’d learned from Holmes.

That performance has become Holmes’ favourite. It was no longer an impression.

“She made it hers.”

They furthered this self-expression for her video “The Actress,” in which Boutilier sings about the characters she would play in her real life to protect herself as a newcomer to L.A., and then Paris. The music video version is far more fashionable and theatrical than her real life, she said. In it, Boutilier dons dramatic outfits to become four archetypes: Cute French Ingenue, the Opulent Hollywood Starlet, the Vengeful Escort and the Outlandish Fashion Girl, each corresponding to a chapter in her life.

“It’s just another way of expressing myself,” she said.

For the stage adaptation of her EPs, Boutilier worked with musical director Dan Kanter, most known for staging tours and playing guitar for Bieber. Kanter had just finished working on the television show “Daisy Jones & the Six” when he was introduced to Boutilier, and was immediately impressed with her late-’70s-inspired sound.

Normally, Kanter has to reel in the grand ideas he pitches to artists he works with. But Boutilier immediately met him at the same level, he said.

“She was speaking to me like we were preparing a show for Madison Square Garden, which is how I approach every rehearsal,” he said.

Kanter hopes that as Boutilier sets out on this next tour and into the future, she gets to put on the shows that match her dreams. He played in her band for some of her shows in the fall, and saw first-hand how cathartic it was for her and her fans to sing her songs together.

As an independent artist, it’s difficult to break through like Boutilier has, Kanter said. For her to achieve that on her own is something special, he added.

“I really believe in Goldie, and what’s amazing is everyone does.”