We’re happy to premiere in full the new album from Melbourne alt five-piece Canary, title I Am Lion, and get the band’s insight into each of its tracks.
Singer Matthew Kennealley describes I Am A Lion as a breakup album: “I was the cognitive distortions and thoughts and feelings I was writing about, or at least I thought I was. The process served to further cement this fusion of my identity with the bad thoughts I was having and the emotions I was feeling.”
I Am Lion is out this Friday July 8, and is available for preorder now, and they’ll be touring the album beginning in August. We recently featured a live performance by these guys, for an idea of what you can expect on the following dates.
Fri Aug 12 – World Bar, Sydney, NSW
Fri Aug 26 – The Workers Club, Geelong, VIC
Sat Sep 03 – The Toff In Town, Melbourne, VIC
(Tickets and further info)
Burning Man
“I am constantly surprised at how far down rock bottom lies/Now the whole world is rolling its eyes/I’m only coming down from the fiercest high”
If there’s a song that best captures the overall tone and mood of the album, this is the one. It’s one of the few I don’t remember actually writing. However, I do remember clearly the hopelessness, anger and frustration, and intense sadness from that time.
When we were first thinking about including a choir on this album, this was one of the first obvious songs we were thinking about. When we play it live, it always feels really high in energy by the end section and this is something we deliberately set out to try to capture in the recording.
Women’s Business
I’d been mucking around with this major/minor chord progression for a while and this song took a little time to form. This is an example of a song where all the other band members had a lot of input into the direction we took it in. This is evident when comparing it to my original bedroom demo. The electric guitar parts that Adam created, the synths and bleeps which were Greg’s addition, as well as the choir at the end, all helped to give it the extra dimensions that it was otherwise lacking.
It was in the mixing process that we realised the song needed to really drive rhythmically and relentlessly throughout and so Zac put a bit of work into getting the drums, bass and percussion feeling just right. This was the first track he mixed and when he first showed it to me complete with all the rumbling, tearing and falling apart at then end, I was pretty excited.
Disappointed
This was the first song I wrote after Dear Universe and after the break up that this record is centred around. The recording on the album is actually the original bedroom demo that I’d recorded fresh as I’d just finished writing the song. We originally had plans to add in some more instrumentation and colours but in the end, it was a lot more powerful and intimate to just feature the choir who bring a certain solemnity to it.
Chameleon
I began writing this song back while we were working on our previous album Dear Universe. It evolved mostly through us having played it for a few years live. Ed’s beat-boxing at the end is a nod to the beat-boxing he did throughout Dear Universe. The instrumental section in the first half was Greg. J. Walker’s idea. Originally we had just a trumpet solo there and when we put two of the trumpet takes together at once, they accidentally worked really well, both parts playing off and against each other. So Greg thought it would be cool to add more horns and strings and fluttery synths and create a miniature Baroque world for a few seconds before bringing the drums back in and continuing with the driving forward motion.
Smile
“I have only done my best/I deserve a cigarette”
This is one of our favourites. But it was one of the hardest to mix. Partially because there was a lot of stuff going on in the end section, partially because it was one of the few where my voice wasn’t double tracked and it was tricky to get it to sit just right, and partially because we just weren’t sure of the world we were trying to create with the song. There were different ways we could have taken it and none of them were obvious.
Recording the choir at the end for this one was one of the best memories from the making of this album. It was the last thing we recorded at the end of a day full of choir tracking and Greg got everyone who was there in the big empty church – including himself and other non-choir members – to sing on it. It was dark, dramatic and really sinister sounding. Which is what we let largely guide us in the end section of the song where things get a little crazy.
The Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life
Lyrically, this is written a little like a letter. If any song on the album is said to be cathartic, this would be it. It is long and the lyrics are written in a direct way that isn’t present in most of the other songs on the album. It documents some of my most bitter and painful thoughts.
We deliberately wanted to keep it raw and simple. So we recorded it close mic’d and live with both Lisa Salvo (the female vocalist) and myself performing at the same time. I thought Lisa’s mmm’s in the gaps between verses had a dreamy Oriental feel and when we found out Greg played Erhu, we asked him to play on it.
Here We Go
“Can’t let go now/Watch me go down”
We wanted to push the mix for this song as hard as we could making it as energetic and chaotic as possible. Zac jumped at the opportunity. Because of the 7/4 time signature it had a feeling of perpetually tripping forward that we wanted to make the most of. We treated it like an intense carnival ride where you feel like you’re only ever just holding on.
Thematically, it’s about the moments which come around from time to time, where the bad thoughts or feelings are deliberately not fought off, and the decision is made to let them in freely and ride them all the way down.
Fickle Heart
This is the simplest song thematically on the album. It expresses the anger and frustration and bitterness and incredulity I felt at a certain point after the break up. It is little more than a toddler tantrum. It is a futile “kicking back” reaction.
We really tried to bring out the difference in mood between the verses and choruses.
Last Resort
This is one of the more solemn songs. It was written in one of my darkest periods where I felt resigned to an utterly hopeless future. Having felt like I had exhausted so many options in my quest to feel better, at this point I felt my options had just about ran out.
But this feeling of hopelessness and resignation was also a nice one. Like the end of a sad film where the credits start rolling and there’s a feeling of solemnity in the cinema and you can’t help but just sit there for a while and reflect upon everything you’ve just seen. Then the lights come on and the spell is broken.
We kept this one simple too. Letting the double tracked guitars and vocals hopefully carry the emotion on their own as well as a few simple but nice notes from Greg’s beaten up, old and out of tune piano.
Hide and Seek
“And when God comes looking for me when he can’t take it any more and just HAS to see everything/I’ll be gone beneath the waves in the place that I retreat to/If I can’t see you, then you can’t see me”
As well as being the last on the album, this was also chronologically the last song written. It is a recapitulation of all the themes that have come before it on the album. It’s a final word, a final protest or a final prayer, to no one.
The song is long and we initially had plans to add in new sounds and instruments all the way through. But we decided that the live take on it’s own, single tracked evoked a sense of loneliness that we didn’t want to mess with.
The final section of this song where everything explodes includes two simultaneous bass takes and 5 vocal and guitar takes which were recorded independent of each other and at different tempos. This was initially an accident to have all this in at once, but we liked it. It gave it a strange and unpredictable rumbling and crashing and delay that was too good not to pursue. So naturally Zac added more delay to everything.
