For nearly a decade, Dust Cwaine has been commanding stages across Western Canada with their signature high-voltage musical drag experiences. Whether as a performer themselves or the masterminding curator behind three drag musicals, bi-weekly performances of burgeoning drag artists, or the producer of shows featuring the well-established talents of Rupaul’s Drag Race alumni, Dust has established themselves as one of the premier voices of the electric Canadian drag scene. But as the leader of Dust Cwaine and the River Children, we find a starkly different side of them. A soulful equal-parts pitch of 90s alternative and contemporary indie-rock, Dust’s songwriting project pushes them into a new spotlight, one that’s intimate, delicate, and personal with all the troubadouring sensibilities of Billy Brag and Alex Cameron and room for the live-wire classic rock and roll outbursts of Alanis Morisette and HAIM. With a tender sense of humour to guide them, Dust’s identity comes into focus out of their anthemic ballads of sexuality, fatness, and sacrifice and their tender melodies of divination, friendship, aromanticism and satisfaction. Their music is nostalgia pop naval gazing for grown theatre kids, just as easy to sing along to as it is to dwell in and meditate on. Powered by bursts of choral refrains and buzzing synthesizers, Dust the songwriter emerges in a lush top-down, blast-out-the-windows, angst-ridden alt-rock catharsis.