THE MATINEE LEARNS TO DANCE AGAIN

Despite the tribulations that led to its creation, there’s nothing at all depressing about the Matinée’s Dancing on Your Grave

therapy over it. Personally, I was really struggling.”

Part of that was because of the implosion of a relationship, the aftermath so messy that Layzell would rather not get into the details. He remembers hitting the road at that time when more bad news hit.

“No relationship ever just ends, so even though it was over, things got heavy to the point where I was blaming myself for a lot of things,” Layzell recalls. “I had to go on tour, and then I get the message from my family: ‘Your grandfather is going to pass—if you want to see him get to Ontario.’ Except I’m on tour so I can’t go.”

On reflection, he realizes he was shutting down except for those moments he was on-stage.

“I was avoiding emotions, avoiding feeling and connecting with people, by diving into touring. It was my one outlet where I could just go and crawl up on-stage, crawl into the van, and then crawl into the hotel and block everything out. I was never a substance abuser or anything like that, but I was definitely drinking and trying to block things out.”

When the tour ended, and there was no longer a nightly 50-minute escape from reality, things got truly heavy.

“I got home and had to start processing things— grieving my grandfather, grieving the relationship, grieving myself,” Layzell says. “I couldn’t get out of my house. There were three or four weeks where it took all of my strength to go to the grocery store and the coffee shop. I wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t see the band and I couldn’t write. We had this looming recording and I had nothing. I really felt like, okay, this is my life now, where I’m going to be a hermit in a basement suite.

“I’d never dealt with depression or anxiety, but all of a sudden it was so real and instant. I remember being forced to go to the Biltmore for one of those cover nights where you pick a song and play it,” he says. “On-stage I was okay. But after that I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t be in the room. That’s when I sought counselling.”

The counselling helped, but what would prove even more inspirational was an encounter with a fan in Rossland. The Matinée played a show in the Kootenay ski town the night before Layzell’s grandfather died.

“It was a great show—this was when I was putting everything into shows because it was the only thing that I had,” he remembers. “I felt really alive that night. Afterwards there was a girl who wanted to talk and buy some merch. She’d seen us a few times, so I felt obligated to give this person some time because she’d been following us. So we just talked. Through the conversation I learned at that time she worked in a care home, and my grandfather was in a care home at that time.”

Things would get surreal and mystical the next day in more than one way. First Layzell—who says he’s normally never on Twitter but was looking for a distraction—logged in to discover someone had posted a random photo, of a guy in a boat shaped like a guitar floating on a lake in Gananoque, Ontario. That’s where the Coquitlam-raised singer spent his childhood summers back east with his grandfather.

“I was like, ‘How the hell does this happen?’ and then I look at the follower and it’s the girl that had been talking to me the night before,” he recounts. “So I messaged her and said, ‘Hey, just so you know, Gananoque is a very important place to me.’ She had no idea—it was a photo she’d tweeted out. We started chatting, and she

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