CBC Arts PresentsQueer Pride Inside: A Buddies in Bad Times Cabaretwas a virtual cabaret featuring over a dozen LGBTQ Canadian artists that CBC Arts produced in partnership with Buddies in Bad Times this past June in celebration of Pride Month. Over the course of the summer, we'll be highlighting some of the individual performances that were included in the cabaret.

"The song started as a piano ballad," Stewart Legere says of "Wrong Machine," his contribution to our specialCBC Arts PresentsQueer Pride Inside:A Buddies in Bad Times Cabaret."Lots of words, and verses, and a bridge, and a chorus...the whole shebang."

But then things stopped quite making sense that way for Legere.

"We were in the middle of the first COVID lockdownwhen I was dreaming up the song," he says."And more and more people were waking up, watching, reactingand participating in the global protests against anti-Black racism, police brutality, continued calls for the abolition of prison and carceral systems, and the need for continued Indigenous Resurgence."

"I kept singing and singing but was becoming tired of my own voice. So I started cutting things out. I kept cutting and cutting words and phrases and verses, until I was left with the only phrase I could really get behind in that moment: 'Wrong machine. Been working on the wrong machine. It needs to break.'"

And so those are the only words that he kept. And then he remembered an ambient track he had been working on previously and decided to merge the ideas.

"I created this very simple, very long intro twominutes of music that I found calming, but something that was clearly building to something. I folded in the lyric. The result is this song. I feel like it offers people a space and time to get settled, to contemplate and imagine the implications of the title to them however they choose to interpret it and then...I just pop in with with those lyrics before taking off again and letting the song wash you away to the finish."

Legerealso made the (stunning) accompanying video, with the help of his partner James MacLean in their apartment in Halifax.

"For me, it's a reflection on sitting in the stillness of my queerness," he says."So much of expressing queerness necessarily takes place in community, but lockdown forced a lot of people to sit alone, or close to it, and for me that meant confronting the silence of my queerness. And so this video, for me, kind of expresses that. The stillness, and flight, of queerness. What it feels like to be quiet, who you are in that quiet, but then who you are when youbreak out and soar, in whatever way soaring manifests itself for you. So I played a lot with black and white, and then bold colour, stillness and rapid movement."

A self-described "avid collaborator," Legereis a multidisciplinary artist who works with a mix of media and technologies and is"fascinated by sexuality, persona, intimacy, vulnerability, and the celebration of performance." He's currentlyan artist in residence atThe Theatre Centrein Toronto,where he's"creating a collaborative, cross-country, multidisciplinary show with queer artists from a bunch of different disciplines about queer loneliness, queer spirituality, and the galaxies of our chosen families." You canlearn more about Legere's work here.

See CBC Arts PresentsQueer Pride Inside:A Buddies in Bad Times Cabaretin its entirety on CBC Gem.

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'In the stillness of my queerness': How Stewart Legere stripped down his emotions for Wrong Machine - CBC.ca