After having heard the gorgeous, melancholic songs of Dallas Green, one might assume the mopey rocker who performs under the moniker City and Colour is some sort of pale-skinned, plaid-shirted waif who is scared of his own shadow.
Nothing could be further from the truth … except maybe an increasing appreciation for plaid to go with his move to a more folkie and less furious style of music, as he leaves his days in post-hardcore scream team Alexisonfire behind.
The colourfully tattooed North Toronto resident’s stunning new album, The Hurry and the Harm, is out June 4, but today we begin with baseball. Green is worried about Toronto Blue Jays pitcher J. P. Happ who was beaned by a line drive in a baseball game the night before, fracturing his skull (he’ll be OK, FYI), which naturally leads into how he almost got into a fight at a recent Blue Jays game. No wilting rose here.
“We live in a hockey town, and a lot of guys bring that hockey mentality,” Green explains. “But I’m too emotionally invested in the Blue Jays and the Raptors. So, I’m personally at fault. I see people behaving badly, or booing, and it really pisses me off. As a true fan, you don’t boo your team. You just don’t.”
Catching a game at Rogers Centre, or hoofing it down the street to The Burger’s Priest near his North Toronto home are just two of his indulgences he shares with his wife, etalk’s Leah Miller.
And, although the Blue Jays may have started off the season in a slump, Green has been on a critical and commercial tear since his first solo release as City and Colour, Sometimes, back in 2005, followed by Bring Me Your Love in 2008 and the Juno Award–winning Little Hell out in 2011.
But things have changed. His new album is the first since his band Alexisonfire called it quits; the safety net is gone and the pressure is on.
Following on the heels of Little Hell, Green officially left Alexisonfire, getting the sizable monkey off his back. It wasn’t long before he started writing new songs. A lot of them. So much so, in fact, that he was ready to get back to the studio in record time.
“I just had the songs,” he says. “I started to notice, when I was finishing them, that many were about that idea and what I was going through when I was trying to make the decision to leave the band. The idea of searching for something else.”
Nowhere is Green’s feelings on the matter on display in more obvious fashion than the song “Of Space and Time,” a lush track that illustrates, in dramatic fashion, a person lost, struggling to find his or her place in the world. It is haunting. And this idea of the artist turning inward to his art in order to make sense of the world is one Green has been pondering since coming across the poetic works of American writer Wendell Berry. Berry is a modern-day Thoreau with a keen interest in “the land.”
“For me, I turn to music, to my songs and to writing. I realized that was what I needed to do, to dig deeper. And it just inspired me to write again.”
Green travelled to music mecca Nashville and Blackbird Studio to work on the new record. Producer Alex Scott hand-selected a crew for Green to work with that included Jack Lawrence on bass (The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather), Bo Koster on keys (My Morning Jacket) and both Matt Chamberlain (Pearl Jam, Fiona Apple) and James Gadson (Bill Withers) on drums.
“The approach was definitely different. It’s the first time I’ve ever made a record with people I’d never met before,” says Green. “Alex has all the faith in me that I don’t have in myself.”
Green is far more critical of himself than most, but even he admits his new album is his best work to date. And, in the end, it is the work, the art, that really matters.
“If I can continue to make records that I love … that’s success,” he says. “I’m not looking for numbers or trophies or top 10 lists, I’m looking for the ability to continue doing this because I don’t know how to do anything else.”