Grieving and thriving
City and Colour’s triumphant return to action is underlaid by loss
All the success in the world will never compensate for the sudden loss of a friend.
So while this fall has witnessed a most triumphant return to action for Dallas Green and City and Colour after an uncharacteristically long four-year layoff between records – including a No. 1 debut atop the Canadian Billboard album chart for the group’s poised sixth album, “A Pill for Loneliness,” and a hot-ticket cross-Canada tour that hits Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena this Friday — that triumph has been undercut by the unexpected passing of longtime producer, engineer and all-around band best bud Karl “Horse” Bareham in late September.
“Our lives are forever changed. Three days ago, we lost our dear friend and brother, Karl Bareham, to a tragic accident,” Green revealed in a statement on Sept. 27, mere days before “A Pill for Loneliness” was due to arrive in stores on Oct. 4. “He was so loved and such an important part of this family — my compatriot for 16 years, next to me in the studio and on the road. After a difficult few days we made the decision to continue on with the shows. He would want us to be together during this terrible time. We’ll carry on in celebration of our beautiful friend. We love you, Horse.”
Needless to say, Bareham’s death knocked the new album’s rollout completely sideways, with a stricken Green unable to do any pre-release press to tee up either a looming October run of soldout two-night stands in five U.S. cities or the 15-date Canadian jaunt in which he’s
currently embroiled.
He and City and Colour did indeed make it as promised to the other side of the world to honour a date at the Brisbane Festival on Sept. 28, however, taking the stage before a bigscreen image of a lone horse for a performance described by Australian music magazine the Music as “watching grief, watching emotions being processed in real time.” And they’ve diligently soldiered on through the shock ever since, no doubt with an element of the same playing out beneath the spotlights every single night.
“It’s day to day,” sighs Green, 39, from the depths of Regina’s Brandt Centre shortly after a pre-show soundcheck last week. “It’s hard because I made the record with Karl and I’m touring on this thing that we made together, but also he toured with us, too, and we’re all out here — thankfully, we’re all together — and it’s weird because every day we do this thing and our friend who’s supposed to be here with us isn’t. I think we’re all just kind of minute to minute.
“And yeah, the fact that we’re starting this touring cycle on this record that we made together is making it a little bit stranger. I’m talking to people about this album that I am proud of, but I’m also having a hard time finding how to be proud of this thing or happy about it when my friend Karl’s not here anymore. It’s one of those things that you’ve got to figure out how to get through, I guess.”
Cold comfort though it might be to those left behind, Bareham’s legacy will live on in the role he played in steering City and Colour from a quiet, sadboy acoustic side project intermittently observed during Green’s downtime from the decidedly more aggressive Alexisonfire toward the unlikely arena act it has become today.
It was, in fact, at the urging of Bareham and “Pill” producer Jacquire King — who worked with Tom Waits, Norah Jones and Kings of Leon alongside an utterly insane list of other big names before joining the City and Colour “family” as mixer on 2015’s “If I Should Go Before You” — that Green was inspired to take the confident steps to making City and Colour sound more like an actual arena act than it ever has on “A Pill for Loneliness.”
Subtly so, of course. City and Colour remains the vehicle by which Green unloads songwriting of a reflective and highly personal nature that never did and never will fit the metallopunk-ish Alexisonfire mould. But “A Pill for Loneliness” nudges the expansive Crazy Horse-isms of “If I Should Go …” one highly satisfying step further into shoegaze territory on the smashing lead single “Astronaut,” and gauzy uptempo numbers “Imagination” and “Strangers.”
It also stirs layered keyboards and ever-more-widescreen atmospherics into the mix on cuts like “Young Lovers,” “The War Years” and “Difficult Love” to propel City and Colour toward a non-icky kind of Coldplay plateau befitting its current station.
The epic, kinda-prog “Astronaut,” in particular, pointed the way to the present, Green says.
“A lot of the songs were a little bit, well, not too outside the box for me,” he chuckles. “They were quite melancholic. And at first I thought I was gonna make a really quiet, sombre record because that was the nature of the tunes when I was demo-ing them. But then I wrote the big, spacey outro to ‘Astronaut’ before I wrote the song. I was just fooling around on the guitar and came up with that spacey, noodly part and I thought, ‘That’s a fun riff. I should try to write a song that can go with this’ because it seemed like it would be a fun thing to do live.
“So I think when I wrote ‘Astronaut’ for that part, that sort of opened up the door to make it a bit more of a grandersounding thing. And then I thought maybe instead of doing a really quiet, sombre record dealing with all of these things, I could still write those songs, but expand the sound a bit more to juxtapose what I’m writing about with beautiful, cinematic kind of production.”
Although City and Colour remains, at core, a project that was never meant to be “bigroom music,” the new songs can rather effortlessly fill a big room without messing too much with the original essence of City and Colour.
This was of paramount concern to Green, who will not be chasing down Max Martin to write him a No. 1 anytime soon.
“Every record I make, I still want it to sound like me,” he says. “I need to be able to hear myself in it because, lyrically and stuff, I’m mostly using it to get something out of my head.
I’m always happy to explore new sonic territories and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, I need to hear me in it.”
Even as Green breaks in the current City and Colour lineup for a tour that will extend into 2020 summer festival season — including familiar guitarist Dante Schwebel and multi-instrumentalist Matt Kelly but replacing Jack Lawrence (back with the Raconteurs for the foreseeable future) and sometime Constantine Doug MacGregor with bassist Anna Ruddick and drummer Leon Power — he’s also just signed on for a run of January dates with hardcore outfit Alexisonfire.
Green pushed “pause” on that when City and Colour turned into a full-time deal circa “Little Hell” in 2011, but the band has been increasingly more active since a tentative reunion in 2015 and even yielded a couple of new tunes earlier this year on the way to a pair of sold-out shows at the Budweiser Stage.
Green seems to have settled into a comfortable co-existence with his present-day obligations. There’s even half a second album’s worth of songs with pal Alecia “Pink” Moore in the can to follow up Rose Ave., their platinum-selling 2014 debut as You + Me, and talk of touring together to support the record when it’s done.
Green is not lacking for stuff to do. And, hearteningly, it’s stuff done for the right reasons, when he and all others involved feel compelled to do it. The music industry has been forced to come their way, not the other way around. Does he ever have “how the hell did this happen?” moments?
“Yes. Constantly,” he says. “I feel like I’m still the same person I’ve always been, who’s always been kind of surprised by the interest people have shown in the music that I’ve made. And, yeah, every day walking around on this tour I’ve been, like, ‘This is crazy.’ I’m very grateful for it, you know?
“To me, the most rewarding part about it is I haven’t changed anything purposefully to get to this point. Does that make sense? I just make the records the way I wanna make them and write the songs the way I feel like they should be at that point and I’ve just kind of grown it,” he says.
“It was never about, like, ‘Oh, now that I’m popular should I try to write a radio song?’ I’ve been able to maintain independence and not had to really try to sell myself too much. It still sort of just remains about my songs and the music and, to me, that’s the most rewarding part.”