
Watch Dylan Sinclair's silky cover of Shawn Mendes's In My Blood
To celebrate the 2025 Juno Awards on March 30, this year's Juno Sessions — the series where Canadian artists cover Juno-winning musicians — are spotlighting those who have won the songwriter of the year Juno.
For the third session, Juno winner Dylan Sinclair chose to cover In My Blood by Shawn Mendes, who took home the Juno for songwriter of the year in 2019. Sinclair is fond of the song's lyrics, because they're "very relatable and easy to connect with."
"[It's] just an empowering song," he told CBC Music.
"I think the second verse is really big," he added. "Just [how] it talks on kind of leaning on your vices of, have a drink and you'll feel better, take her home and you'll feel better."
Sinclair's smouldering R&B vocals give a sultry touch to the sweeping song, complete with some stunning runs near the end. It's a pared-down but powerful version that fleshes out the song's theme of resilience.
Including his songwriter of the year Juno, Mendes has won eight Juno Awards. He is up for artist of the year, pop album of the year, TikTok Juno Fan Choice and single of the year at this year's show.
Sinclair won the traditional R&B/soul recording of the year Juno in 2023 with Savannah Ré for their tender duet, Last One. He is nominated at this year's Junos for contemporary R&B recording of the year.
Watch Sinclair's sleek cover above, and check out cbcmusic.ca/junos for the next Juno Session release.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Winnipeg Free Press
7 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Book club to survey Sinclair's essays
The Free Press Book Club and McNally Robinson Booksellers are pleased to welcome Winnipeg author (and Free Press columnist) Niigaan Sinclair for the next virtual meeting on Tuesday, June 24 at 7 p.m. to read from and discuss his award-winning essay collection Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre. Published in May 2024 by McClelland & Stewart, Wînipêk compiles a year's worth of Sinclair's Free Press columns as well as other writing about how our perception of Winnipeg, and the ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens co-exist and survive, is a window into larger questions about colonialism and reconciliation nationwide. Wînipêk was a national bestseller, landing on a number of year-end lists of best books. Sinclair's debut collection also netted him the Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction, news he was able to share with his father, Murray Sinclair, before he passed in November 2024. Mikaela MacKenzie / Free Press files Niigaan Sinclair In his review of Wînipêk for the Free Press, Matt Henderson says Sinclair 'takes the reader on a journey through the land, water and seasons, the underbelly and magnificence that is Winnipeg,' adding 'Sinclair identifies the overt racism as well as the legislative, calculated mindsets that have intentionally set out to destroy Indigenous Peoples and culture.' Yet Sinclair retains hope for the future of the city; 'Wînipêk is a portal into our violent past, our precarious present and the promise of tomorrow. It should be mandatory reading for all Canadians,' Henderson writes. Sinclair will join fellow Free Press columnist Jen Zoratti, McNally Robinson Booksellers co-owner Chris Hall and Free Press audience engagement manager Erin Lebar to read from Wînipêk, discuss the book and field questions from viewers and readers. Copies of Wînipêk are available to purchase at McNally Robinson Booksellers; there's no cost to join the book club or virtual discussion. Video of the meeting will be available for replay on the Free Press YouTube channel following the event. For more information and to register, visit Wînipêk


Winnipeg Free Press
7 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Fit for the pit
There are few things punks enjoy more than arguing over what or who is or isn't punk. If nothing else, In Too Deep: When Canadian Punk Took Over the World — a new book documenting commercially successful Canadian musical exports of the early Aughts, with varied ties to the punk world — should prove to be a spirited conversation starter. Just how far that conversation goes will depend on how crusty the punks involved in that conversation are. John Woods / Free Press files In January 2025, Sum 41 perform at the Canada Life Centre in Winnipeg. If one grants that the artists featured in the book — such as Gob, Sum 41, Billy Talent, and Napanee, Ont.'s very own superstar Avril Lavigne — are at least influenced by punk, if not dyed-in-the-darkest-denim punk themselves, then one might consider this well-researched book a welcome addition to a growing list of Canadian music histories focused on relatively contemporary subjects. Overall, In Too Deep provides an insightful look at the music industry in Canada during the early days of the 21st century, and how online innovations such as file sharing, message boards and MySpace impacted the industry, for good or ill. While chapters on Billy Talent, who gained massive popularity in Europe, and Alexisonfire, who broke out in the American hardcore scene, cover much the same ground as the chapter detailing their careers in Michael Barclay's Hearts on Fire: Six Years That Changed Canadian Music 2000-2005, they do make for solid introductions for readers unfamiliar with either group or the punk scenes from which those Ontario bands emerged. Similarly, while devoted fans of any of these groups may or may not come across any information they were unaware of beforehand, those without much prior knowledge are provided insightful snapshots of the early histories and the big breaks of all nine artists profiled. Organized and written in much the same manner as Dan Ozzi's Sellout! — which detailed the DIY-to-superstar trajectories of American punks such as Green Day, Against Me!, My Chemical Romance and more — In Too Deep is a very readable, if only passingly critical, overview of the artists involved and an overlooked era in Canadian music history generally, where homegrown groups of misfits certainly made major international commercial splashes and commensurate influence on many big name mainstream artists coming up today. Commercial and mainstream, of course, being the operative words. In wrapping up the chapter on Sum 41, Bobkin and Feibel state that the group 'became Canada's first internationally acclaimed punk band,' although the statement isn't qualified beyond a list of sales achievements, and that the band's songs appeared in a number of Hollywood films. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. There are many Canadian punk bands, both predecessors and contemporaries of the artists profiled here, who may not have had the sales numbers to go up against Sum 41, but whose artistic and cultural impact is much more profound. Bobkin and Feibel do pay some lip service to these contemporary groups, with brief but well-placed 'Further Listening' sidebars throughout, which feature critically acclaimed local heavy hitters such as Propagandhi — whose debut How to Clean Everything is credited by Fat Mike with establishing Fat Wreck Chords' signature sound of the '90s, a style credited by the authors to have influenced at least half the bands featured here — as well as Toronto's Fucked Up, among others. In Too Deep But the legacy of groups such as DOA and Teenage Head are given just brief nods in the introduction, while punk pioneers such as SNFU and Nomeansno, who spent decades in the punk trenches and influenced countless bands along the way (and to this day), aren't given any ink at all. Which just goes to show, you can't please everybody all the time — especially not punks. Sheldon Birnie is a Winnipeg writer and the author of Missing Like Teeth: An oral history of Winnipeg underground rock 1990-2001.


Winnipeg Free Press
10 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers
NEW YORK (AP) — Andrew Sean Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, remembers the first time he read Edmund White. It was the summer of 1989, he was beginning his second year at Brown University and he had just come out. Having learned that White would be teaching at Brown, he found a copy of White's celebrated coming-of-age novel, 'A Boy's Own Story.' 'I'd never read anything like it — nobody had — and what strikes me looking back is the lack of shame or self-hatred or misery that imbued so many other gay male works of fiction of that time,' says Greer, whose 'Less' won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2018. 'I, of course, did not know then I was reading a truly important literary work. All I knew is I wanted to read more. 'Reading was all we had in those days — the private, unshared experience that could help you explore your private life,' he said. 'Ed invented so many of us.' White, a pioneer of contemporary gay literature, died this week at age 85. He left behind such widely read works as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty' and a gift to countless younger writers: Validation of their lives, the discovery of themselves through the stories of others. Greer and other authors speak of White's work as more than just an influence, but as a rite of passage: 'How a queer man might begin to question all of the deeply held, deeply religious, deeply American assumptions about desire, love, and sex — who is entitled to have it, how it must be had, what it looks like,' says Robert Jones Jr., whose novel above love between two enslaved men, ' The Prophets,' was a National Book Award finalist in 2021. Jones remembers being a teenager in the 1980s when he read 'A Boy's Own Story.' He found the book at a store in a gay neighborhood in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, 'the safest place for a person to be openly queer in New York City,' he said. 'It was a scary time for me because all the news stories about queer men revolved around AIDS and dying, and how the disease was the Christian god's vengeance against the 'sin of homosexuality,'' Jones added. 'It was the first time that I had come across any literature that confirmed that queer men have a childhood; that my own desires were not, in fact, some aberration, but were natural; and that any suffering and loneliness I was experiencing wasn't divine retribution, but was the intention of a human-made bigotry that could be, if I had the courage and the community, confronted and perhaps defeated,' he said. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. Starting in the 1970s, White published more than 25 books, including novels, memoirs, plays, biographies and 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a response to the 1970s bestseller 'The Joy of Sex.' He held the rare stature for a living author of having a prize named for him, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, as presented by the Publishing Triangle. 'White was very supportive of young writers, encouraging them to explore and expand new and individual visions,' said Carol Rosenfeld, chair of the Triangle. The award was 'one way of honoring that support.' Winners such the prize was founded, in 2006, have included 'The Prophets,' Myriam Gurba 's 'Dahlia Season' and Joe Okonkwo's 'Jazz Moon.' Earlier this year, the award was given to Jiaming Tang's ' Cinema Love,' a story of gay men in rural China. Tang remembered reading 'A Boy's Own Story' in his early 20s, and said that both the book and White were 'essential touchpoints in my gay coming-of-age.' 'He writes with intimate specificity and humor, and no other writer has captured the electric excitement and crushing loneliness that gay men experience as they come of age,' Tang said. 'He's a towering figure. There'd be no gay literature in America without Edmund White.'