Dallas Green goes from loss to hope

The Canadian singer-songwriter is back with his seventh solo album as City and Colour

For once, Dallas Green actually sounds pretty optimistic.

After dealing with months of unimaginable forms of loss in 2019 and 2020 — with the deaths of his friend and cousin in a short span, the deterioration of his personal relationships and essentially his career — Green, also known as City and Colour and for being one-fifth of the heavy rock band Alexisonfire, is finally feeling like himself again.

But the journey through that loss wasn’t easy, chronicled in his seventh full-length City and Colour album, “The Love Still Held Me Near,” released Friday. He needed a bit of a push.

The Canadian singer-songwriter had received a bunch of at-home recording equipment from the family of his best friend and producer, Karl “Horse” Bareham, who died in a scuba diving accident in Australia in the fall of 2019, 10 days before the official release of Green’s previous album. Bareham’s death set off an avalanche of moments that buried Green, who was approaching 40 at the time, in what he calls a “tailor-made mid-life crisis.” Then, as we all well know, the world shut down in March 2020.

“I just felt like I had lost, a lot,” Green said over the phone earlier in March, days after finishing a tour in Australia. “I felt I was losing my way of life, which was all I had known for 20 years: making music, recording it, and then going out and touring.”

Even though he might have stepped back from music in 2020 for a brief period of time, whether intentionally or not, its cathartic lure is what ultimately brought him back, and the recording equipment he received from his late friend’s family is what finally gave him the motivation to learn something new, with some help from longtime City and Colour bandmate Matt Kelly.

Green joked that Bareham used to scoff at his previous attempts at recording at-home demos — “What the f-k is this?” he recalled Bareham saying — but perhaps if he were still around he’d be proud of what Green can do now.

His first DIY recording project were two covers from one of his favourite bands, Low, released in late June 2020.

“That was a real spark for me because I was just creative, you know? And I was singing two of my favourite songs,” Green said, adding it felt like he was “freeing up space in that part of his brain.”

“But it wasn’t like it wasn’t me trying to write or create something new. I was just making it music.”

Then those creative floodgates were open again, first with the “rebirth,” as the St. Catharines native said, of Alexisonfire and their Juno Award-winning 2022 album “Otherness,” and now with the next City and Colour album, which was recorded last year in Caledonia, Ont., with Kelly, John Sponarski (guitar), Erik Nielsen (bass) and Leon Power (drums).

Green is typically known for what some might say is melancholic music; “The Love Still Held Me Near” is really about his journey to rediscovering a hopeful version of himself. Musically, those raw tones — although grittier, more stripped down and live-sounding than his previous works — are still there. Lyrically, it’s a little brighter.

In the first single and first track of the album, “Meant to Be,” Green recounts grappling with the death of his dear friend and his reluctance to accept it. But as the album progresses, the optimism begins to percolate and, even in tracks like the third single, “F-ked It Up,” Green sounds reconciliatory. In the final song, “Begin Again,” it’s quite evident he’s ready for this next transition.

“I don’t think that they’re all just completely about loss,” Green said about the new songs. “I think the record is about my journey getting through it all … But I think there’s grief tied to just about every part of the record. It’s about staring death literally in the face and thinking about the rest of your own life.

“It just became this total all-encompassing, like, moment of, I won’t say closure because it’s not that. But it was just like, ‘Oh, the thing that I was scared to do, which was to write about all this,’ is the thing that helped me process a lot of it and deal with it,” Green added. “And that, I think, comes out in the hopefulness on the record, because I do feel like there was a time where I would have gone in the complete opposite direction.”

However, the one constant with Green — in both City and Colour and Alexisonfire — is the dedicated legion of fans who have stuck by him the past 20 or so years. In the song “Things We Choose to Care About,” Green sings “no more easy victories of youth,” and it’s quite poignant for many of those around the same age who might share similar elements of Green’s “tailormade mid-life crisis.”

“I have never taken it for granted that people who listen to my music are the reason I get to do this,” he said.

Now, as he embarks on a number of shows with both bands later this year, Green is excited that he’s back to doing what he knows best: making music, recording it, and then going out and touring. This includes some very high-profile supporting slots for massive bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Vancouver just this past week, plus headline Toronto shows with Alexisonfire on June 16 and with City and Colour on Aug. 25, both at Budweiser Stage.

And more importantly, you can hear the hopefulness in Green’s voice.

“I think there’s this point when you’re sort of in that weird limbo period between creating something and releasing it,” Green said about the lead-up to the album’s release. “I wondered if I still feel close (to the album) and, listening to it recently and now with people listening to the songs, like I somehow feel even closer to it.

“Which I’m really happy about.”