Label: Six Shooter Records
Headquarters: Toronto
Year founded: 2000
Founder and president: Shauna de Cartier
Notable artists: William Prince, The Dead South, Tanya Tagaq, Whitehorse, July Talk, Peter Dreams, Boy Golden, Skye Wallace, NYSSA, T. Thomason, Rheostatics, Elliott BROOD, Amelia Curran, The Deep Dark Woods, NQ Arbuckle
More than two decades ago, Shauna de Cartier started one of the first and only female-founded independent record labels in Canada, Six Shooter Records. But despite the significance of this endeavor, she didn’t think about such things back then. Music was the main thing on her mind when she started the company, just two years after taking on her first music industry job — managing the D.I.Y. band Captain Tractor, who had their own label.
“I didn’t know the music business at all and they taught me,” de Cartier says.
Originally from Edmonton, Alta., de Cartier founded the label in 2000, based in Toronto, ON. In 2025, Six Shooter — which also has management and publishing divisions — will turn 25 years old with “a team of 15 high-performance ninjas,” de Cartier says of her mostly-female staff.
The label’s roster currently includes William Prince, Tanya Tagaq, Whitehorse, The Dead South, Nyssa, July Talk, Rheostatics, Boy Golden, Elliott Brood, T. Thomason, Amelia Curran, and many more.
“I just sign artists who make music that I love. It’s not really with any genre in mind. For me, it’s about excellence,” de Cartier says.
In 1999, she visited Toronto for the Canadian Music Week music industry conference and festival where she saw the band Veal at a Paquin Agency showcase.
“I was completely smitten with that band,” she says, which was fronted by Luke Doucet, who also played guitar for Sarah McLachlan (he still does, and is also one-half of Whitehorse with his wife, Melissa McClelland).
De Cartier “convinced him” to let her manage Veal. In the summer of 2000, she suggested he make a solo acoustic album and, by December, he delivered it. That would become Six Shooter’s first release, 2001’s Aloha, Manitoba. She got distribution for the label through Outside Music.
“That was very significant. That’s really all you needed to start a label back then,” she says.
The name, Six Shooter, is an homage to her home province.
“I feel like the mindset and culture from the Prairies is different than it is in Ontario. It’s more pioneer, more maverick, more bootstrappy,” she explains. “I wanted something that evoked that spirit of the Wild West. And with the logo, the girl on a horse, that was important. The gender identity was always a key part of the branding of Six Shooter.”
Knowing few people in the industry in Toronto, she was welcomed by other women, particularly Blue Rodeo’s manager Susan de Cartier [no relation].
“She introduced me to everybody.”
She also shared office space at the time with other women in music. One of them, Helen Britton, would help her with her newborn baby and often hold down the fort. Soon, the two trailblazers became business partners and created their new company, Six Shooter Inc., including the management roster and record label.
“We have been business partners now for 20 years,” says de Cartier.
She reveals that during the first five years of the label, she funded it with credit cards.
“I was probably $400,000 in credit card debt.”
The management clients typically bring in more revenue than the label, for which she makes signing decisions based on her love of the music, as opposed to commercial viability. Sometimes, they are one and the same.
In the 2000s, Six Shooter became pegged as a roots label, but that “blew wide open,” she says, with the signing of throat singer Tanya Tagaq.
“I always have this metaphor of Six Shooter as a house where artists can live to create the body of work within them. That’s usually what I say and how I think about Six Shooter, but Tanya came in and she deconstructed the house.
“The thing is, we didn’t know that Tanya was going to be as successful as she is. I mean, she’s considered to be a world music artist, a throat singer, the North Pole. We didn’t know that she was going to win Polaris [Music Prize, 2014] or this, that, or the other thing that was going to happen with her. We just knew that she was this incredible artist that we really wanted to support.”
Six Shooter Records’ biggest band is The Dead South. In 2023, they finally achieved gold status in Canada for the 2014 album Good Company, and platinum in America for their single “In Hell, I’ll Be in Good Company.”
“We have been all-hands-on-deck, strategizing and working super hard on the build-up towards the release of their record,” she says of the 2024 album Chains & Stakes. “That’s been a monumental amount of work for everybody at Six Shooter. Everybody is engaged on that. That’s on its way to being a huge success.”
William Prince also had a breakthrough year in 2023, making his Grand Ole Opry debut, doing live collaborations with The War and Treaty and Willie Nelson, earning an emerging artist nomination from the Americana Music Association, headlining Canada’s largest soft-seat theatres, and in 2024, winning his first Juno Award.
“We went into the release of his record [Stand In The Joy] at the beginning of 2023. Probably one of the most well-defined strategies I’ve ever put into place for an artist, and we were able to hit most of those targets,” de Cartier says. “He’s definitely one of the brightest stars in our constellation, but not the only one.
“We also have a lot of new projects in the fire. Peter Dreams from July Talk has a solo record coming out, and Boy Golden has another record coming out. I signed an artist last year, Nyssa, who I think is a goddess and we just released her record in February, and she has been doing the showcase circuit, SXSW, Great Escape, and other things, introducing her to the world. We also signed T. Thomason. His record is coming out this year, too. That’s a lot of brand-new projects, so things are pretty busy.”
