Calgary musician Fitzgerald finds the art in heartache
It's Michael Bernard Fitzgerald's 30th birthday when we chat this late March afternoon in the Altadore coffee shop Monogram.
And it finds him in what he calls a “reflective” mood.
He'll spend it doing some work on his laptop, drinking coffee and later that night, his mom is having a small celebration for him — a quiet dinner, no big deal.
It's certainly different from three years ago when he threw himself a huge musical bash at MacEwan Hall with a few hundred of his friends, most of whom came dressed in “Canadian tuxedoes,” as per the birthday boys wishes.
A case of older, wiser, and, dare we say, more mature?
“I'm coming to terms with it as I say it: I turned 30 today,” Fitzgerald says over the din of the crowded room.
Fitting, then, that a couple of weeks previous there was another birthday of sorts for the local musician as he officially released his third and latest album of songs titled I Wanna Make It With You.
Reflecting his current mood, it is a very mature pop record, one that finds the artist at his most personal, his most introspective, most honest and, at times, his most moving, with the content showing Fitzgerald has come to terms with many things in his life.
It’s almost like you’re on the verge of losing control over the reason you’re in it. I remember around my birthday last year, it was awful.
Which brings up the question: Is it his mid-life crisis album?
Fitzgerald laughs. “I guess. I guess. It certainly documents something.”
What it predominantly documents is the dissolution of his long-term relationship, one that seemed fated for a happily ever after. It was written while he was in the very eye of that heartbreak and struggling with all the feelings that arrive when love ends.
“I'm wary to call it a breakup record, though,” he says. “I mean I wrote it from an honest place, but I think in all of the tunes, I left it kind of open-ended. There's still a little bit of hope throughout the whole thing. I guess I was writing it as I was going through it and I wasn't sure what the outcome was going to be.”
What the result is with I Wanna Make It With You is the artist’s strongest work to date, one that takes all of that emotion and wrings every last melodious ounce of teary, bittersweetness from it. It’s classically catchy, superbly enduring. There is beauty, there is melancholy, there is anger, there is questioning and, yes, there is that hope.
Again, that comes with how fresh the wound was when he was writing the record, noting it was a dark time, but he consciously “chose to live in it for awhile,” be present in the experience no matter how painful it may have been at times.
“But at the same time, I’m so glad that I got to, as a creative (person), live in that space for a bit,” he says, noting he was in L.A. at the time and wore out a pair of shoes walking around Silver Lake convalescing with his ache.
“It’s almost like you’re on the verge of losing control over the reason you’re in it. I remember around my birthday last year, it was awful. It was awful.”
He credits the people with whom he surrounded at that time with helping to pull him out of saying they were, “super patient with me and super kind.”
That kindness and comfort continued when Fitzgerald returned home to record the voluminous amount of material he’d been inspired to write. He did that at OCL Studios, living and recording at the facility with his band, most notably longtime percussionist Andrew Ball, and frequent collaborator and resident OCL genius Josh Rob Gwilliam.
He says it was the “right way to make the music” and, appropriately, it brought out of him the 18 tracks that make up Make It.
And, true, while it ultimately is a very personal document of a very personal time, it speaks a great deal to how well the thoughts, the ideas, the songs and the album as a whole are crafted that it should transcend MBF’s own experience. It’s a realization he’s come to over the course of the past few weeks.
“Everyone’s got their version of that story, everyone’s got a thing,” he says.
“It’s been interesting, since the release, people have been really eager to let me know that they connected or it resonated with them or whatever. “It’s cool.” He pauses. “Even if it’s heard by myself and two other people, I get the sense that what we set out to do was important for some reason.”
The title track of the album already has spent most its life on charts across the country, meaning that connection is spreading. And the record has also helped land him on the lineup of two western Canadian summer festivals, including Rifflandia in Victoria and, as was announced earlier this week, a spot on the Mainstage at the Calgary Folk Music Festival.
Beyond that, Fitzgerald is hoping the record will be a conduit for he and his band to travel more, even make it across the pond to see exactly how universal love and heartbreak really are.
Which represents something of a quandary for the artist — his truest desires coming true would likely have him revisiting his deepest loss in front of a roomful of people on a nightly basis.
“But as a person onstage, one of the most rewarding feelings is singing a song that you feel just comes from an honest place,” he says, bringing back that optimism.
“And the three or four or five minutes it takes to sing it is well worth it. That real connection, with me and the lyric, or myself and the listener, it’s founded in a really honest place.”
Michael Bernard Fitzgerald’s album I Wanna Make It With You is available now. He performs July 22 on Prince’s Island as part of the Calgary Folk Music Festival.