As a teenage music fan growing up in Canada shortly before file sharing changed everything, The Wedge was invaluable. MuchMusic’s “alternative” program highlighted homegrown independent acts at the same time as countless formative favourites. In the center of it all was host Sook-Yin Lee, whose unscripted interviews inspired artists to open up like never before. I can vividly remember her conversation with Kid A-era Thom Yorke and Phil Selway, showing off a casual side of the sullen British art-rockers.
Since leaving MuchMusic in 2001, Lee has become a subcultural force of nature. Alongside above-ground gigs as a CBC radio host, she has acted in films such as John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the sexually explicit Shortbus, before playing Olivia Chow in the 2013 political biopic, Jack. Behind the camera, Lee’s recent projects include her psycho-sexual ghost story, Octavio Is Dead! and the grief-stricken lockdown feature, Death and Sickness.
Naturally, Lee has also spent the past four decades juggling her second life as a musician. Beginning in the mid-80s with her alt-rock band, Bob’s Your Uncle, she explored funky territory with Slan, and earned the Neko Case cover treatment for her solo single, “Knock Loud.” During the 2010s, Lee teamed up with her romantic partner and longtime collaborator Adam Litovitz to make haunting electronic pop as JOOJ. Tragically, after struggling with anxiety, depression, and prescription drug dependency, Litovitz died by suicide in 2019.
To celebrate the story of their relationship and the massive void left by Litovitz’s passing, Lee completed a cycle of songs they had begun working on together, releasing jooj two this April. She has now followed the album with an intimate video for “Delicate Tracks,” pushing her vocals into soulful territories while the music drifts towards downtempo trip-hop. “It began with one of Adam’s simple and sublime piano passages which I imported and looped in the studio, adding bass, beats and a bank of vocals,” she explains in an email to Ears to Feed. “Vocals arose from a mysterious place. I rarely sing R&B but soul came naturally.”
“After Adam passed, I was alone one morning overcome by hard feelings when there was a knock on my door,” Lee continues in her email. “Musician Jennifer Castle held a rose bush. We hardly knew one another and she did not want to intrude but was compelled to bring it to me. I was grateful for her intervention. Symbolically this prickly rose is Adam at a prickly time. The flowers are fragrant, the thorns protective and potentially painful. Everything that comes together must separate. It has been two years since Adam exited. In my night garden his rose returns with a mighty bloom.”
Sook-Yin Lee & Adam Litovitz’s jooj two is now available from Mint Records.