City and Colour’s Dallas Green turns pain into beauty on ‘The Love Still Held Me Near’

'A switch turned on where I realized how important making music is to me on like a cellular level where I need it,' Juno winner says of latest LP

It’s not lost on Dallas Green that he released an album about loneliness just a few months before the world was forever changed by a global pandemic.

In the midst of a tour in support of 2019’s A Pill For Loneliness, his sixth under the moniker City and Colour, Green was one of the many acts that saw a busy 2020 concert season go out the window due to the coronavirus pandemic. But the grinding halt forced the three-time Juno winner to reflect inward in a way he hadn’t since breaking out with post-hardcore rockers Alexisonfire more than 20 years ago.

“It was a very strange place to be out there touring on this record that I had released a week after my friend Karl (‘Horse’ Bareham) passed away,” Green says in a Zoom interview from his home studio in Toronto. “We made the record together and nothing felt totally right.”

The dissolution of a long-term relationship and the death of a close cousin made Green retreat further inward.

“I really just didn’t feel like writing at all,” he says. “Or I was too convoluted emotionally to even think about it.”

But now in his 18th year as City and Colour, which began as his solo acoustic side-project following the release of 2005’s Sometimes, Green says the forced time away enabled him to rediscover his love of singing songs.

“A switch turned on where I realized how important making music is to me on like a cellular level where I need it, and I have since I was a kid. I realized I could use the thing that I have always leaned on to possibly start the healing process. That was a real revelation, and that coincided with Alexisonfire starting to jam here and there. Suddenly, I had a creative explosion.”

In 2022, Alexisonfire regrouped and recorded Otherness, the band’s first full-length record in over a decade.

At the same time, Green went back into the studio with multi-instrumentalist Matt Kelly, John Sponarski (guitar), Erik Nielsen (bass) and Leon Power (drums) to lay down tracks for the songs that make up City and Colour’s seventh studio LP The Love Still Held Me Near.

“I think when I was in the process of writing the songs it was helping me cope with everything that I had gone through,” Green explains. “What I didn’t know was if I was writing these songs that were desolate and sombre.”

But as he rawly revealed more of himself amidst new arrangements and soundscapes, Green found himself moving from feelings of loss to hope and redemption. It’s a deeply personal set of songs that makes up his most emotionally resonant album to date.

“By the time we made the record, I did feel that the songs contained a lot of joy, and were more about the journey forward and working through painful times versus dwelling on the actuality of them,” Green says about the new songs.

Over the course of the disc’s 12 tracks, Green sings melancholically about losing a loved one (“How do I carry on?” he asks on opening track Meant To Be) before finding his way out to a more hopeful ending.

The music cuts deep into the human experience; with death lingering on the sidelines. But Green’s acoustic sound is also filled with lush textures that infuse the songs with a warm blanket-like feeling.

Begin Again, the album’s closing track, is a delicate ballad, while Hard, Hard Time turns up the twang. F—ed It Up latches on to you with its rising crescendo and Bow Down to Love lets Green ponder his optimistic mindset against a driving guitar riff.

“When I decided that I would write about what I had experienced on my own level, I understood that the things I was dealing with were not singular to me,” he says.

“All of these things happen to everyone. So it became this realization that I can write about this and if I can use it to help myself, great. But if I can make it into something that will turn the pain into something beautiful that can grow wings, it can do the thing that my music has seemed to do for the people who listen to it. That’s a much better idea than keeping those feelings inside.”

City and Colour’s The Love Still Held Me Near is now available.

mdaniell@postmedia.com

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