On the one hand, he is an acclaimed singer, songwriter, and guitarist whose songs sound like a prairie-bred and countrified Elliott Smith; on the other, he spent several years as the leader of the spacy neo-psych rockers Veal, Vancouver's answer to the Flaming Lips. A proud and vocal member of Canada's exploding indie music scene, Doucet also pays the bills as a studio musician and producer for decidedly non-indie acts like Sarah McLachlan and Chantal Kreviazuk.
Doucet was born and raised in Manitoba, where he initially planned to become a lawyer before the guitar became his primary obsession. He moved to Vancouver and formed Veal in the mid-'90s, when bands such as Zumpano and Cub were making the coastal city Canada's primary indie pop mecca. After two Veal albums, 1996's Hot Loser and 1999's Tilt O' Whirl, Doucet gathered songs that had been rejected as too soft by his bandmates and recorded his debut solo album, 2001's Aloha, Manitoba. Emboldened by that album's positive press, he recorded one final album with Veal, 2003's The Embattled Hearts, before breaking up the band and resettling in Toronto as a solo performer; he released 2004's Outlaws, a closet-cleaning collection of live tracks and older unreleased material, to celebrate the fresh start. Doucet released his second studio album, Broken (And Other Rogue States), in 2005. In the summer of 2006, he married singer/songwriter Melissa McClelland, whose albums Thumbelina's One Night Stand and Stranded in Suburbia he had produced. ~ Stewart Mason