Mount Royal inspires Daniel Isaiah on Come Into Gone
Cramped room boasting a view of Mount Royal served as setting for second solo album, Come Into Gone
In the Mile End apartment he has called home these last eight years, Daniel Isaiah keeps a space devoted to music and another to writing.
The Montreal West native, who spent the bulk of his formative years at Jewish schools in neighbouring Côte St- Luc, can likely be found at his work desk in the spacious and tidy living room during business hours. It’s where he plies his more time- consuming trade: scriptwriting.
Across the kitchen lies a more cramped and cluttered room boasting an unobstructed view of Mount Royal. In this inspiring setting, Isaiah wrote his second solo album, Come Into Gone, with a guitar and a small piano made with less keys than the norm.
“Music is a relaxant for me,” the 35- year- old said, motioning to the music room while seated at the other end of the apartment. “Mornings are good. I like to wake up, have a coffee, and then on an empty stomach get lost a bit in making music. Late at night can also work. During the day it’s more the other stuff.”
Artists tend to be multidisciplinary by necessity, and Isaiah is no exception, but he does his best to keep his music and film work separate. That means physically, in terms of a well- delineated apartment layout, as well as mentally.
“Writing takes concentration. It takes more discipline. The kind of folk and rock I do doesn’t,” he observed. “But they balance each other well. There’s so much waiting in both. You make a record and you have to wait six months for it to come out. You write a script and it might take a year or years before you shoot it.”
In 2014, Isaiah directed and cowrote the short film, Entre chien et loup, under his full name, Daniel Isaiah Schachter. Right now, he’s in laid- back talk- singing songwriter mode, although the next movie project could be just around the corner.
After years in bands, Isaiah made his solo debut with the album High Twilight in 2011. He didn’t feel the pressure to follow it up in a timely manner.
“I never work on a deadline with music. I sit down every day, and over time accumulate a collection of songs,” he explained.
If this were Tin Pin Alley in the early 20th century, Isaiah suspects he could have pushed himself to write a few songs a week on command. For the calmly- paced Come Into Gone, he started with chords and melodies that were either quickly built into songs, or remained in unfinished stasis for months. Collaborator Chris Flowers joined him in the music room to flesh out the ideas. ( Flowers provides the album’s unexpectedly grand guitar solos.)
Isaiah recorded with a band in Griffintown this time around, so even though he hasn’t changed much as a songwriter since High Twilight, the arrangements are more robust and uptempo, or as he put it, “snappier.”
There was even a song with enough of a groove to serve as an obvious single, although Isaiah insisted Heaven Is On Fire was no different than the other tracks until Flowers devised a Let’s Danceera Bowie guitar delay on a whim.
Unlike at his scriptwriting desk, where the words need to flow, Come Into Gone’s lyrics came late in the process. He wrote them in a neutral spot: a Parc Avenue coffee shop.
“It’s not the thing that attracts me to making music. For me, writing lyrics is the chore you have to do afterwards,” he said.
Isaiah’s location- specific songs reference a road trip to the southern United States and a stepsister in Ohio. But another song, Tug of War, combines the old biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel with modern Israel, a subject that comes up often in his lyrics.
“Part of the reason why it comes up is my Jewish upbringing,” he explained. “I have family there and I visited as a teen, so it’s on my mind a lot. I feel even though it’s not my country, I still feel implicated in what’s happening there, although I don’t know how.”
Come Into Gone is released this Tuesday. Daniel Isaiah launches his album on Tuesday, April 7, at 8 p. m. at Casa del Popolo, 4873 StLaurent Blvd. Tickets cost $ 8 in advance, $ 10 at the door and can be purchased at popmontreal.com.
I never work on a deadline with music. I sit down every day, and over time accumulate a collection of songs.