City and Colour returns
Dallas Green sings of ‘love, life, death’ and tours U.S., Europe
City and Colour’s fifth album is titled If I Should Go Before You and was released Friday. At the ripe old age of 35, singer/songwriter Dallas Green is apparently sweating over the big stuff in new songs such as the soulful Lover Come Back.
Only five years into his 2008 marriage to TV host Leah Miller, isn’t this a tad premature?
“Love, life and death are three things that are a certainty, aren’t they?” says Green. “And I think that as long as I am singing and playing my guitar, that is what I’ll have on my mind. This is what I’ve been doing for more than half my life and I don’t really know what else to do.”
Exploding out of St. Catharines, Ont., in 2001 with Juno Awardwinning rockers Alexisonfire, Green always had his solo project. The first City and Colour recordings date back to 2000 and he is on record as saying the initial meat of some of the material was written in his teens.
But it wasn’t until the 2006 debut Sometimes that it gathered steam. Riding the success of the lead single Save Your Scissors, City and Colour established Green as an important Canadian and global music artist.
At the time, City and Colour was Green and his guitar. Then it became a band. It continues today as a shifting entity.
“One of the great parts of it is that all of the songs are still rooted in me and my guitar, so I can go from band to solo or back again,” he says. “When we finished up the last tour cycle for The Hurry and The Harm before I went into the studio to start writing the new album, I went off and did a small tour of theatres with just me and my guitar performing to some of same audiences which had been at the band arena shows.”
There was also time between writing If I Should Go Before You to form the duo You + Me with American pop singer Pink (Alecia Moore) and put out last October’s Rose Ave. The laid-back folky album entered the Canadian chart at No. 1 and was No. 4 on the Billboard 200. It’s a far cry from the duo’s self-titled debut single to the nearly 10 minute-long atmospheric guitar squall of Woman, which opens If I Should Go Before You.
Green says his model for the shifting personality of his art is the iconic Neil Young.
“The way that he follows whatever is moving him at that time, be it an acoustic album, on the road with Crazy Horse or this new one with Willie Nelson’s kids backing him,” says Green.
“City and Colour can do Coachella, then the Saskatoon Jazz Festival and head to Australia and break up shows between band and solo. This is always how I wanted it and I’m so thankful and blessed that people are so accepting of it.”
Fans will be excited to hear the new material for the first time when City and Colour heads out across the U.S. starting with a Detroit show on Nov. 5 and then heading to Europe.
Green is chuffed fellow Canucks Bahamas will be on some of the bill through the U.S.
“It’s always good to tour with fellow Canadians,” he says. “Afie (Jurvanen, a.k.a. Bahamas) actually toured with me as my guitarist to Australia back on the Little Hell tour when my guitarist Dan Romano, who has a terrible fear flying, couldn’t come. Bahamas would just do the opening slot and then join us.”
Back then, Save Your Scissors was still on the set list. Not this time around.
Green says he’s not interested in looking backward.
“Much to the despair of a lot of fans, I won’t play much from the first album because I’m just not a victory lap kind of guy,” he says. “I want to do the band material with the band and save the quieter material for the solo tour that will undoubtedly follow.”
All good, it seems? Perhaps, but Green says he will still be up at night thinking about the darkerside, harbinger-of-doom topics that led to the inevitable title for the new album.