I grew up in one of those neighborhoods where everybody smiled at you on the sidewalk but talked shit the second you turned the corner. Picture-perfect lawns, casseroles dropped off when someone got sick, church potlucks every other Sunday. And underneath all that warmth? A whole ecosystem of people watching, judging, waiting to see if you’d fuck up so they’d have something to talk about. I didn’t realize how much that environment shaped me until I left it. The way I still flinch a little when someone’s too nice too fast. The way I’ve learned to read a room before I even sit down. Some lessons stay in your body, you know? You carry them whether you want to or not. Joanna Borne’s “Wolves” cracked that whole thing wide open for me because she gets it. She fucking gets it.
The opening lines land with this eerie clarity. “I ran with wolves / They seemed nice / Beautiful / But they bite.” Joanna grew up in northern Saskatchewan, literally raised around wolves and wolf dogs on rural land. She knows the real thing. And she’s drawing that direct line between animals that can be tender and terrifying in the same breath and the people we grow up around who operate the same damn way. For production, she linked up with David Lehr and Jesse Brock, who built this whole sonic world around her voice. Low-end bass that practically growls at you, guitars with real grit and texture, and these eerie wolf howls woven throughout the track. Sean Moffitt handled the mix, John Greenham did mastering, and the final product sounds massive. Polished without losing its teeth.
Advertisement
“The wolves taught me discernment,” Joanna says, “how something can be loving and unpredictable at once.” And damn, that hit different. “It’s the same lesson I apply to people.” She’s talking about intuition as survival skill. The kind you develop when you grow up somewhere beautiful on the surface but complicated underneath. When she sings “The sun’s goin’ down / Watch your back / My home’s beautiful / But it’s sad,” there’s no bitterness in it. She’s stating fact. Acknowledging that the place that raised her was gorgeous and gutting at the same time.
What makes this track stand out is the acceptance woven through it. “Still sweet though / At least I think so / These roots / Made me grow.” She’s reconciling with her origin story. Joanna spent close to ten years working psych nursing before going all-in on music, and that background shows up in how she handles emotional weight. She doesn’t need to tie everything up neat. She can sit with the difficult shit and still find something worth holding onto.
The song reflects growing up in a place where people stuck together and tore each other apart in equal measure. That constant tension between wanting to belong and knowing you might need to protect yourself from the same people you love. “I saw them turn / Pickin’ sides / I saw the curse / Painted high.” She watched people she trusted flip based on convenience or old grudges nobody could even remember the start of anymore. “Anger’s hangin’ round / From the past” captures how that energy lingers. Entire communities carrying hurt that gets passed down, seeping into every interaction whether anyone acknowledges it or not.
Advertisement
The chorus settles into this gorgeous, haunting acceptance. “Ooo I don’t really mind / How the world made me.” She’s looking back at all of it, the wolves who seemed nice, the beautiful sad home, the roots that grew her, and she’s decided she’s okay with who she became because of it. There’s power in that. The vulnerability too, when she adds “Got me lookin’ back / All like ooo,” followed by that whispered warning: “Run when they come for you.” Even in peace, she knows what she knows. The instincts stay.
Joanna first emerged in 2014 under a different artist name, picked up Canadian radio play by 2015, and eventually made the move to Nashville where she stripped everything back and rebuilt her sound from scratch. Darker. More atmospheric. More her. Her work has caught attention from outlets like VENTS, Mystic Sons, and Backseat Mafia, plus placement on Apple Music’s ALT playlist. For the “Wolves” visuals, she went back home to Saskatchewan and shot with photographer Teigan Uhlik and her friend Sky Phoenix at a wolf outreach sanctuary. Real wolves. Real history. The whole visual story grounded in actual lived experience rather than aesthetic for aesthetic’s sake.
I think about my old neighborhood sometimes. The friends who became strangers over nothing. The adults who taught me kindness with one hand and judgment with the other. I used to resent how guarded it made me, how I learned to watch people’s actions instead of trusting their words. Took me years to realize that wariness wasn’t damage. It was data. Joanna Borne knows exactly what I mean. She took her whole complicated origin story, the beautiful home that was also sad, the wolves that seemed nice but could turn, and she made peace with it on her own terms. The roots made her grow. They made me grow too. Sometimes the sharpest version of yourself comes from surviving the people who were supposed to be safe.
