DARK to light
Calgary expats Reuben and the Dark return with Arms of a Dream, the band’s second album, which took four years to get just right
It’s a common hiccup in the evolution of a band’s career.
Band releases a debut album that does well and establishes them as a unique new voice. Then, just when they seem to be on a roll, they take years to follow it up. It has almost become a rock ’n’ roll cliché.
That may be why Reuben Bullock, who heads up Calgary expats Reuben and the Dark, sounds a bit sheepish when explaining why it took so long for the Dark’s second album, Arms of a Dream, to see the light of day. The band’s debut, Funeral Sky, came out in 2014 on Toronto’s Arts & Crafts label, building on a reputation for dark and poetic songs that Bullock established on two critically acclaimed solo records, 2010’s Pulling Up Arrows and 2012’s Man Made Lakes.
Call it the second-record jitters, but artists often second-guess themselves on Album No. 2 out of fear of falling into the dreaded sophomore slump.
“I set the bar really high for this album,” says Bullock, in an interview from his home in Toronto. “I maybe fell into the same thing that everybody does on a second release, and that is to really start questioning everything, from the process to the songs, and really thinking about what you want to be putting out.”
It certainly wasn’t a case of writer’s block. Unlike with his past records, where Bullock would write just enough to fill an album, Arms of a Dream took shape by whittling down 50 to 60 songs to the 12 that appear on the record. Work was done in multiple studios, with the band setting up camp in London, Los Angeles, Montreal, Banff and Toronto. Songs were matched with three producers — Stephen (Koz) Kozmeniuk, Adrianne (AG) Gonzalez and Graham Lessard — and the band eventually landed at OCL Recording Studios in Calgary to corral all the pieces into a cohesive whole.
“They were all scattered across the world and we took them in and put in the throughlines at OCL,” Bullock says. “Everything ended up coming out of that studio as a finished product.” It wasn’t that Bullock was fishing around for a sound. He had a strong notion of what he wanted the band’s sophomore album to sound like.
“I wanted this one to be big in a number of different ways,” he says. “We played a lot of incredible venues and festivals over the last three or four years, on stages with tons of people in the audience. I really started realizing playing all the songs in our usual set the kind of tone I wanted to bring to the stage; to be able to play these big festivals and arenas and have songs that work in those environments.”
It’s not hard to envision the songs on Arms of a Dream filling a stadium. Opening track Wild Life ebbs and flows from intimate acoustic guitar to soaring synths. Woke Up A Rebel recalls vintage Peter Gabriel in how its tightly coiled verses explode into a thundering chorus. Hallelujah is both menacing and rhythmic, backed by chanting vocals and featuring lyrics about “a devil walking in the daylight.”
Bullock’s lyrics are full of ominous imagery that gives the songs a dreamlike, enigmatic quality. The news release for the album proclaims it Bullock’s most “vivid and transformative music to date: an intimate exploration of the inversion of imagination and reality in dreams.” Bullock’s own detailed explanation of his headspace while writing them doesn’t exactly clarify things, either.
“A lot of it came from this idea of living a double life, of having one existence being in dreams and one being in reality and how different those were feeling for me,” he says. “I think I tried to pull a lot of that dream-state influence into these songs as much as I could, trying to channel a bit of the subconscious. Looking back at all these songs, it’s becoming more and more obvious what I was writing about even though at the time I would just close my eyes and try to write whatever came to mind. Now I can look through and it definitely is a bit of a diary or journal entry from the last four years.”
The songs are reflective of the upheaval and major changes in his life. He got married three years ago, moved to Toronto and maintained a hectic touring schedule with his band. He now suspects he was undergoing a “mid-life crisis” of sorts, despite only being in his early 30s. “It’s been a cold, cold night in this old heart of mine,” he murmurs on the haunting title track.
“I was getting hints of that from escaping every night when I’d fall asleep and being a bit confused and a bit exhausted every morning when I was waking up,” he says. “I had this imagination of living a completely different life when I was sleeping. Arms of a Dream is kind of a bridge between those two realities for me. I think that’s why it took so long to write this album, I didn’t place a lot of intention, I just wrote every single day and waited for those stories and for those words to just come up.”
Anyone familiar with the band’s history knows it has never been one to rush the recording process. Bullock became the talk of Calgary ’s music scene back in 2013 when Reuben and the Dark signed to Arts and Crafts, which is also the Canadian home of fellow Calgarian Feist and a who’s who of indie darlings including Broken Social Scene, Dan Mangan, F — ked Up and the Japandroids.
Like Arms of a Dream, Funeral Sky took shape over a lengthy period, in a variety of studios and after a few false starts.
The difference this time around is Bullock’s cautious approach to meticulously developing the new album produced dozens of songs that essentially ended up on the cutting-room floor.
Will he eventually open that vault and free these orphans? Will there be an album of obscurities and B-sides? Perhaps a box set released in the distant future?
“I’m thinking about that a lot right now,” he says. “I have a hard time abandoning any songs. We’ve added to the library. But that’s the nice thing about music these days, too, though. The album is great but a lot of people are just putting out songs. So we might try that out in the future.”
Reuben and the Dark will play the Calgary Folk Music Festival July 28. The Festival runs July 2629 at Prince’s Island Park.