Jonathan Roy

Few pop singers arrive with a Hall of Fame goaltender for a father and a junior hockey career behind them, yet that is the route Jonathan Piuze-Roy took. The Canadian singer and songwriter was initially headed for the rink until his father, Patrick Roy, told him his future lay away from hockey and urged him to plan an education. Roy chose music instead, writing poetry from his early teens and setting it to melody around age 16. The result, as the Montreal Gazette's critic puts it, is easygoing 21st-century pop with a little light reggae, somewhere between Ed Sheeran and Paolo Nutini.

Early albums What I've Become (2009) and Found My Way (2010) were followed by La route, his French-language debut, in 2011. In 2012 his father helped arrange a meeting with Corey Hart, the 1980s pop singer who runs Siena Records, an affiliate of Warner Music. Hart signed him after Roy performed a Teddy Thompson song at Hart's home in Nassau, Bahamas. Mr. Optimist Blues, his major-label debut, followed in 2017, with Hart executive-producing and writing three of its songs. In 2023 Roy joined an all-star recording of Serena Ryder's 'What I Wouldn't Do' in aid of youth mental health.