Pittsburgh Duo Canary on Bowie: Annual Covers and a Legacy Across Time
In this interview I talk with Pittsburgh duo Canary – Josh M. Slifkin and Helena Nichols – about how they work, why Bowie sits at the center of their collaboration, and what it means to keep his songs alive in 2025.
Canary has been active since 2012, but their partnership began earlier when Josh needed a vocalist for something he had written and Helena, who had taken voice lessons throughout her childhood and attended a performing arts middle school, agreed to sing. They met through Chatham University, where Josh teaches and Helena had been a student, only later realizing they had lived down the street from each other for years without knowing it. Their work is built around a clear division that quickly blurs: Josh brings in a full musical sketch, Helena writes vocal lines and lyrics, and then, as Josh puts it, “everything you came up with changes everything I thought,” forcing him to rethink and rebuild the track around her performance.
They are a studio-based project; they joke that they have “played live once in this room.” Bandcamp is their main outlet, with original material on Bandcamp and Bowie and other covers posted to SoundCloud and YouTube. Helena, who grew up through the transition from tapes and CDs to streaming and online music, describes platforms like Bandcamp, YouTube, and Instagram as making it easier for eclectic artists and listeners to find each other without traditional gatekeepers.
Their annual Bowie cover tradition grew organically after a first attempt they liked, and Bowie emerged as the point where their tastes overlap. Helena says that for almost anything you might want to hear, “there’s a Bowie era for that,” whether rock, pop, or something more experimental. That range gives them room to move stylistically from more electronic textures to acoustic approaches. They aim to be “respectful of the songwriting” while accepting their own limitations and strengths. Josh does not try to sound like Bowie and instead asks what they can do “that’s a little bit different and kind of… shines a new light on this great song.” Their version of “Loving the Alien” consciously builds on Gerry Leonard’s stripped-back Reality Tour arrangement, while their “Fantastic Voyage” leans into the lullaby quality Josh hears in the original and uses Helena’s classical training and layered harmonies to reshape the song’s emotional arc.
Helena talks about the way singing Bowie alters her understanding of the material. She starts by silently reading the lyrics and often finds herself thinking, “oh, this is actually about this!” That close reading shapes how she paces and phrases lines, sometimes stretching or compressing them to emphasize particular images or feelings, especially in a song like “Heat,” whose meaning neither of us claims to fully grasp.
We also range into Bowie’s wider legacy: Josh sees younger audiences rediscovering him, notes students who know specific eras, and connects that persistence to vinyl’s return and to Bowie’s reach across media, from painting to early experiments like BowieNet. Looking ahead, Canary plans to mark the tenth anniversary of Bowie’s death by covering “Lazarus,” a choice that reflects both their affinity for Blackstar and their sense that Bowie’s work remains “so interpretive” that new performers can still find unexplored space inside it.