The song started during the rainy season in Ethiopia in 2019. Adey had traveled from Toronto at her mother's request to undergo five days of tsebel — a healing ritual in which cold water is poured over the body as a priest prays. What emerged afterward was "The Dress," a piece of music she would spend the next six years rewriting, re-recording, and refusing to let go of. Earlier this year she released it as an EP containing five iterations of the song, each one a different stage of its life.
> "I just wanted people to see the process and the evolution of the song."
That impulse — to show the seams, to let the work announce its own labor — runs through everything Adey does. Now 38, she is preparing to release Unorthodox, her 10-track debut album, in September. It arrives after almost 20 years of making music, performing on stages from Toronto to Addis Ababa, and opening for Julian Marley in Ethiopia. By any industry measure, a debut album two decades in should feel late. For Adey, the timeline was never really the point.
The Long Apprenticeship
Adey has been making music for almost 20 years, but her first official release — "Sandman," built around the instantly recognizable melody of Pat Ballard's 1954 standard "Mr. Sandman" — did not arrive until 2016. That song became a fixture of her live sets, the one audiences kept asking for. When it came time to build Unorthodox, she returned to it.
> "That's been a song that I've performed over the years. People always request that one…[so] we re-recorded it for a new production. Kind of slowed it down a bit and turned it more into a vibe."
The album's 10 tracks were finished roughly two years ago, bringing together newer material with songs from different periods of her life that she revisited and rebuilt. The process reflects an artist who treats songs not as finished products but as living organisms — compositions that mature alongside the person who writes them.
Performing has always been the center of gravity. The stage is where Adey locates meaning before anything else.
> "There's nothing else that gives me that feeling. It's just an unexplainable joy."
But recording — committing a version of yourself to permanence — required something else entirely.
Building the Strength
The gap between performing and releasing was not accidental. Adey has described a deliberate process of fortifying herself for the exposure that comes with a recorded body of work. In a music industry that rewards early visibility and constant output, she chose a different route: she waited until she was ready.
> "I had to build up a strength, to get to this point, to be ready to deal with whatever may come with being visible and being seen."
That readiness is not just psychological. Over the last six or seven years, Adey has spent increasingly long stretches in Ethiopia, connecting with other artists and building a community she now considers family. The trips gave her both creative raw material — the tsebel ritual, the rainy season, the landscape that seeps into "The Dress" — and something harder to name: a sense of artistic groundedness rooted in place rather than industry.
