Northern Dial Artist Profile

William Prince

Peguis First Nation, Manitoba, Canada

William Prince grew up on Peguis First Nation in Manitoba, where music first functioned less as entertainment than as service. His father was a preacher and musician, and Prince learned to accompany him on guitar while travelling to First Nations communities and singing at church services, wakes and funerals. That background shaped the measured pace, deep baritone and sense of emotional responsibility that became central to his songwriting. His debut album Earthly Days introduced that voice nationally and won the 2017 JUNO for Contemporary Roots Album of the Year, turning a regional Manitoba singer-songwriter into one of Canada's most distinctive new roots artists.

Prince expanded that foundation rather than abandoning it. Reliever developed his folk-country writing on a broader production scale, while the 2020 companion project Gospel First Nation returned directly to the hymns, communities and contradictions of the Christian tradition in which he was raised. Stand in the Joy continued the arc in 2023 with songs built around love, family and survival rather than treating Indigenous identity as a fixed subject category. Across that catalogue, Prince has earned two JUNO Awards, received the John Prine Songwriter Fellowship and appeared on stages ranging from NPR's Tiny Desk to the Newport Folk Festival, building an international audience without separating his work from Peguis and the Manitoba Interlake.

His fifth album, Further From the Country, arrived in October 2025 and widened the sonic frame with a more expansive band while returning to questions of distance, grief, identity and what it means to leave home without severing it. The record's title captures the tension running through Prince's career: his music has travelled far beyond the community where he learned to play, but its power still comes from the restraint, storytelling and communal purpose formed there. In Canadian roots music, Prince represents a contemporary Indigenous songwriting voice that can sit naturally beside country, gospel, folk and Americana traditions while remaining unmistakably grounded in his own place and experience.