Serena Ryder (b. 1981)
Filed under the name Serena · May 12, 2026
Serena Ryder is a Canadian singer-songwriter with that soulful, kind of raw voice, Juno-Award-winning albums to back it up, and she's also been really open publicly about mental health struggles alongside the music career, which honestly matters to me more than the awards do. I deal with anxiety and the occasional panic attack myself, out loud, online, because I think staying quiet about it just makes other people feel more alone with it, and it seems like Ryder's been doing a version of that same thing through her music for years. There's something about a soulful voice specifically, not a polished, over-produced one, that lands different when you know the person behind it has actually been through something real and isn't performing a persona. I think my generation talks about mental health way more openly than the ones before us did, sometimes almost too casually, not gonna lie, but artists like Ryder who were doing it honestly before it was a whole trend deserve real credit for that. Juno Awards are nice. Being that honest publicly, for years, is harder.