3 questions with

BRAIDS

From their early days performing in Calgary as the Neighbourhood Council, the members of the now Montreal- based Braids have always had a knack for balancing pop hooks with musical sophistication. The band’s third album, Deep in the Iris, is easily their best work to date, a collection of richly textured songs that explore themes of heartbreak, abuse and rape culture with impressive openness. Swerve writer Peter Hemminger caught up with singer Raphaelle Standell to talk about her emotionally raw songwriting.

I’ve noticed when people talk about your lyrics, they almost always describe them as vulnerable, which isn’t really how I hear it— to me, there’s always a sense of strength and ownership in how you perform your songs. Is vulnerable the right word? I don’t think vulnerability is weakness. When you’re being vulnerable with yourself, and when you’re in a safe environment, when you’re making art, I think vulnerability can be a really beautiful and important thing. I would definitely say that I was very vulnerable on this record, just with delving into some things that were very personal for me. It’s really vulnerable to say “I was really hurt,” or “I feel a lot of regret about this one thing I did.” That in itself is vulnerable, because you’re putting yourself out there for criticism. So yeah, I think the process of writing this record was a vulnerable one, but I’m happy to be vulnerable.

How do you stay emotionally honest the 10th or the 100th time you perform these songs? Sometimes you’re not as emotionally raw as you’d like to be, and those are just the shows that maybe aren’t as good as the other ones. But there’s always moments where you connect so much with what your intention originally was in writing the song, and those are the shows that you try to learn from. Like, what did I do right in that moment, and why did I feel so connected to it? Also the meaning can kind of shift as you perform it... My experience with performance has completely changed over the course of this record. It’s so little about me being on stage, and it’s so much more about the audience, which I never actually used to interact with that much. I was always kind of like, this is our band, and this is what we’re doing on stage, and then there’s the audience. Whereas now, my approach is very much that we’re all sharing in an experience.

Was that something you were consciously trying to change, or did it come from the response to the record? It actually came from meditation, I think. I do a lot of metta meditation, and I started doing transcendental meditation, and I just felt a lot more connected to people on a much grander scale than just my friends or my family. And I definitely notice it when I’m on stage. I think, for the band, though, we have consciously spoken about wanting to have an experience with the room and wanting to all really play together, because sometimes we can get lost in what it is we’re doing as individuals, just because the music is really complicated to play and there’s a lot of buttons to hit on time. You kind of get lost in your own little world.