Elyse Aeryn is all over the province these days.
From Harmony Bazaar in Lockeport, a night in Truro, Rock the Hub, to Makin’ Waves in Sydney’s Wentworth Park with Dave Sampson.
Hailing from the tip of Nova Scotia, she’s a Glace Bay roots-rock diva who quit a secure chemical engineering career in 2020 to follow her dreams full-time.
Not long ago, she says, audiences were pleasantly surprised to find her on a bill. Now they’re waiting. And none of it was a given.
In September 2025, Elyse was riding her motorcycle near home when she collided with a car. She spent three weeks in a Halifax hospital, her jaw wired shut for about six weeks after, and months before her hands could hold a guitar right. Not ideal when you’ve got a new record to promote.
Her album Everybody Loves You… was already done. The second in her discography, the 10-track album was recorded at Soundpark Studios in Sydney and explored themes of dreaming (and living) bigger than she’d settled for. Her first album had won a Music Nova Scotia award, and her sophomore effort was due in October, complete with a tour booked to start three weeks after the crash.
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From her hospital bed, with her band around her, she moved the release date to February.
Lo and behold, the vinyl showed up.
“Holy shit,” she remembers thinking. “We’re just gonna look at these records in these boxes for months now?”
She spent the winter walking past them, promoting a record nobody could hear yet. But as the album’s first track, “Unstoppable,” suggests, giving up is never in the cards for the singer.
“I never thought once that I could possibly cancel that,” she says.
With a major show set to take the stage at the Membertou Trade & Convention Centre, alongside the album rollout, pressure mounted slightly, but the venues and community told her to take her time.
The rebuild began on her living room couch.
She was scared the guitar wouldn’t come back, so she reached for “Cherries,” one of her own and the easiest to strum. And there it was.
“The first night that I strummed a few chords, and just played a few of my songs, I was like, ‘oh yeah—I still have this. It’s still mine,’” says Elyse. “It almost felt very spiritual.”
She used the steady approach she learned in engineering: show up every day and let progress add up. She practiced for 45 minutes to an hour until she could remember eight songs. Then she plugged in at the studio, practiced standing, and finally moved to her onstage choreography. She calls these steps chapters. Her physiotherapy followed the same routine: “Even when it sucked, I just showed up, knowing that time would heal all.”
Singing was the slowest. Six weeks of a wired jaw takes more than muscle to undo.
“These lyrics are my life—I’m telling you everything,” she says. “That’s scary on a good night.” The goal, she says, was “not to find my voice again, but to get comfortable with my voice again.” She’s still at it.
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Garrett Taylor, her partner and the guitarist on both her records, cheered her on from the other end of that couch. He and fellow musicians covered her booked gigs, including a wedding. Friends turned up with books, snacks, comfortable pyjamas. A fundraiser started on her behalf closed at $83,322 from 828 donations, and what it bought was time: she could heal at home instead of hurrying back to the humble bar gig that funds her musical dreams.
“Just to know you’re being thought of is nice sometimes,” says Elyse.
As for what’s changed before and after her collision, Elyse says that prioritizing the important moments money can’t buy and deprioritizing the moments when the money isn’t right has been a major turning point in her life and career.
She books differently now. Fee against the drive against what it takes out of the band—if the math is bad, she passes. She asks for the hotel; she keeps a room for her family and her friends, and is ultimately intent on enjoying the journey.
“I really make a point of spending more time now with my mom, and with my closest friends who don’t live here. When they visit, I’m usually too busy with shows or work. Last night, I was with a good friend and said, whatever I’m doing can wait; I need to see you while you’re here,” says Elyse. “It’s been soul-filling. It feels good. I’m so happy I can make that time now. I probably always could, but I kept telling myself I was too busy because I was making my own schedule.”
As for her first post-collision show, it happened right on schedule. At the end of February, Elyse returned to the stage at the Membertou Trade and Convention Centre. A sold-out show, the two-hour concert was filled with familiar faces. “I forgot how hard this was,” she says, “to jump around and sing and hair flip for two hours.” She wasn’t sure her voice would hold. “Every time I looked out there and saw those faces, I could keep going.”
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Meanwhile, the album she’d already finished kept going without her. “Unstoppable,” recorded months before (and reworked with some modern synth instrumentation), took Release of the Year at the 2026 East Coast Music Awards.
With her new outlook on life and making her time make sense (and dollars), Elyse is on the road: Sydney, Digby, Halifax, Truro, and whatever she says yes to after that.
Call it a comeback if you want—she won’t. “There’s not a comeback anymore,” says the singer who never stopped.
