Scot Helman growing along with his audience
Helman’s newest album rewards fans for patience
There was nothing mysterious or cryptic about the inspiration behind Scott Helman’s debut fulllength album, Hotel de Ville.
He was guided by what is perhaps the oldest and busiest muse of them all.
“I fell in love with this girl, who was my ex-girlfriend from high school, again,” says Helman from his home in Toronto. “She lived in Montreal. So I basically moved there for a month. I mean, I moved there to start my record, but I also moved there because I wanted to make that relationship happen. It had already started but I wanted to see where it was going and I thought the only way to do that was to actually go there.
“A lot of that time for me was about following my heart and not compromising what I needed to do. It was weird and cool that my romantic life was so synced up with artistic desires. It was like two gears that slotted in with each other and the record just started to be created.”
Speaking ahead of his appearance Saturday at the iHeartRadio WestFest at Shaw Millennium Park, the 21-year-old singer-songwriter has plenty to say about love in general and his own love life in particular.
“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to try and be with this person,’” Helman continues. “Instead of being halfassed about it, instead of being a millennial about this sh-t, I’m going to try and actually do that. I think I really like Montreal because there is something so old about it. It’s really weird when you go there and you’re like, ‘I’m in Canada right now? This doesn’t feel like Canada. It feels like some other place and I think that’s really interesting.’
“I felt that was part and parcel with the relationship that was beginning for me.”
There were other, perhaps more abstract, benefits of being in Montreal. It is the hometown of the late Leonard Cohen, who was not only an unparalleled master when it came to poetic explorations of the heart but also a songwriting hero of Helman’s.
Helman has been described as having an “old soul” (“Whatever ... that means,” he adds, somewhat sheepishly) and his list of influences include not only Cohen but Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Songwriting has always been a priority, even in those early days when he was a precocious 15-year-old high-schooler whose developmental deal with Warner Bros. required him to write and collaborate with prolific zeal.
But it also may be why there were a few years between his 2014 debut EP, Augusta, and Hotel de Ville, which came out a few months back. A gap of a little more than two years between records may not seem like a big deal, but in the fickle world of pop it shows a refreshing amount of restraint for an artist who has been touted as next-big-thing material for years.
“There’s some people who can put content out non-stop,” Helman says.
“Which I’m sure I could do. But I didn’t want to put out art unless I knew it was exactly the way that it was supposed to be. To me, it just seemed more respectful for my audience to wait, to put out something I thought they deserved.”
While Augusta’s hits such as Bungalow and The Sweater showcased Helman’s early alt-pop savvy, the tracks on Hotel de Ville may be even more assured.
Songs such as Kinda Complicated, Sweet Tooth and The Kite are all deceptively breezy summer pop that also contain more than enough sophistication to bear repeated spins.
While Helman may have been influenced by the excitement of new love, the tone varies throughout the record, from melancholic songs such as Gaslight to Origami, a sweet mid-tempo ode to devotion.
There’s evidence Helman’s audience is coming of age alongside him. While the album has only been out a few months, he says many of his fans already seem wellversed in the new songs.
“I’m a very lyric-based person,” Helman says. “I feel like that is where most of my art goes into. It translates because I think my fans are also lyric people. They know every lyric to every song. It’s awesome.”