MONIQUE BARRY – “COYOTE”
A SPILL EXCLUSIVE VIDEO PREMIERE
Monique Barry continues to celebrate the first anniversary of her album HAAK with the live video release of “Coyote”.
Back in March 2025, Monique Barry conducted a live video shoot of three songs from HAAK, with the plan to release them one by one to celebrate the album’s first anniversary. The first video, “Gone+Eagles”, was released in July 2025, followed by “New Eyes” released in November 2025.
Barry’s concept for HAAK (an acronym for High as A Kite), which she began in 2016, was to embody the passage from idealism to experience in real time by releasing a series of singles as she wrote them, and ordering them in the same way on the final album. Admittedly, she did not expect the project to take seven years. And yet the emotional journey is all the richer and more profound because of it.
Barry and producer-director Michael Wojewoda created live performances of three of the songs from HAAK with the intention of capturing the album’s lavish and ethereal qualities, both sonically and visually.
“Coyote” began to take form when it was reported that a coyote had been seen in Toronto in Monique’s own neighbourhood, leading to a set of lyrics addressing the troubling dynamic of mutual invasion: namely, the animal’s encroachment on urban settings, which has been brought about by man’s destruction of wildlife habitats. Both confrontation and avoidance are part of the conflicting forces that Monique explores here as she depicts the repose of urban humanity to the presence of the canine outsider. Rather than confront the significance of the animal’s presence, the action taken by the local citizens is to record the novelty of the coyote’s image on cell phones – capturing the animal, and in a sense, in a secondary, new, and artificial environment. Further to this, “Coyote” comments on how we confuse the meaning and impact of what’s being stored on our electronic devices. In this collision between man and beast, entrapment claims both the intruder (who is forced to live in an alien surrounding not suited to it) and the human inhabitants (who can’t interact with the animal and must monitor its activities from a distance within the safety of indoors.)
The musical stalking of “Coyote” is accomplished with the expertise of Alisdair Jones on bass guitar, Michael Wojewoda on drums, Dean Drouillard on guitar, Emma Campbell on vocals and Monique Barry on piano and vocals.
The extraordinary mood in the video is created by lighting designer Jym ‘Bubba’ Campbell and Projections and VFX by Craig Small.
Monique has forged a style that marries the everyday to the otherworldly, resulting in musical dreamscapes teeming with innovations, oddities, emotional echoes, and the many stops and starts along the human journey began to take form when it was reported that a coyote had been seen in Toronto in Monique’s own neighbourhood, leading to a set of lyrics addressing the troubling dynamic of mutual invasion: namely, the animal’s encroachment on urban settings, which has been brought about by man’s destruction of wildlife habitats. Both confrontation and avoidance are part of the conflicting forces that Monique explores here as she depicts the repose of urban humanity to the presence of the canine outsider. Rather than confront the significance of the animal’s presence, the action taken by the local citizens is to record the novelty of the coyote’s image on cell phones – capturing the animal, and in a sense, in a secondary, new, and artificial environment. Further to this, “Coyote” comments on how we confuse the meaning and impact of what’s being stored on our electronic devices. In this collision between man and beast, entrapment claims both the intruder (who is forced to live in an alien surrounding not suited to it) and the human inhabitants (who can’t interact with the animal and must monitor its activities from a distance within the safety of indoors.)
The musical stalking of “Coyote” is accomplished with the expertise of Alisdair Jones on bass guitar, Michael Wojewoda on drums, Dean Drouillard on guitar, Emma Campbell on vocals and Monique Barry on piano and vocals.
The extraordinary mood in the video is created by lighting designer Jym ‘Bubba’ Campbell and Projections and VFX by Craig Small.
Monique has forged a style that marries the everyday to the otherworldly, resulting in musical dreamscapes teeming with innovations, oddities, emotional echoes, and the many stops and starts along the human journey.
Monique Barry
HAAK
(Independent)
Release Date: June 20, 2025
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