City & Colour: “Searching for the sweetest melody”

There cannot be many artists that have shared stages with Gwar, P!nk and a puppet Yam chef during the course of their career.

Yet after 11 years of hitting the road with Alexisonfire and City and Colour, Dallas Green is one such man. We put this fact to him as the snow fell in London earlier this year as we met to talk about forthcoming album The Hurry and The Harm. His response? “That’s a good one. I’ll take it.”

The Hurry and The Harm is Green’s first release since Alexisonfire officially called time on their career and completed their final world tour. The record finds him playing with a completely new band and marks the first time in his career that a photo of him has appeared on an album cover. We ask if, after everything that has gone before, the album feels like a fresh start?

“It has to do with being a little older. I’ve gone through a lot in terms of bands and touring and popularity and all that stuff, but I think the photo on the cover has a lot to do with my confidence in the record. I’ve never really had as much as I do on this one. I don’t mean confidence that it’s going to be the biggest record of the year, but confidence in myself, as in I’m proud of it. On every record I’ve ever made I’ve been proud of them but i always look back and think I could have done something better… but when I listen to this one, it’s exactly how I wanted it to be.”

Although the record is once again produced by Alex Newport, who was also behind the desk for City and Colour’s previous album Little Hell, the approach taken was different, relocating the process outside of Canada for the first time in Green’s career. The chosen location? Nashville.

“The first thing Alex and I said when we got together is let’s not stay in Ontario. So I said what about Nashville, because a) I like the city a lot and b) it’s got Blackbird Studios which is arguably one of the best studios in the world gear wise, vibe wise and history wise. I knew there would be some players there – you can go down Broadway on any given night and you might find the greatest guitar player in the world sitting in a bar, shredding.”

“Also, I didn’t want to go to California,” he shrugs, smiling. . “I was also afraid because I knew I was going to go in with session people and the last thing I wanted to do was go and make “The LA record”. Nashville just felt comfortable. And it’s only one hour from Toronto.”

Green wasn’t wrong about being able to pick up some great players while in Nashville – players on the record include Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs on bass, Bo Koster of My Morning Jacket on keys and Caitlin Rose’s pedal steel player Spencer Cullum amongst others. Although he continued with his usual process of demoing every part and arrangement before taking it the band, the line-up was able to bring new things to the table:

“It was a case of here is the idea, now excel and run with it. I’m not a great drummer so take the idea and give me your best shot. Like with Jack I could tell that he had learnt all my bass parts, but then he would say ‘I can play this but I could also do that’, and of course that was how it should be… his bass playing is so great, and we really wanted to dirty up the bass as a juxtaposition.”

The album begins with a swell of feedback building before giving way to a swooning pedal steel. It is perhaps a nod to his past, but also a way of playing with his audience. At the heart of it all is a man who is just as happy to discuss Drive Like Jehu and Metz as he is to talk about The Red House Painters or Mark Kozalek’s guitar style. As is natural, these different interests feed into his writing, a fact that Green clearly thinks is lost on some people.

“I’ve always been striving towards this sort of amalgamation for so long. People always made this deal like ‘Dallas Green has these two sides – this angry hardcore guy and the soft sensitive guy’. No. I just write lots of different styles of songs. I like the quiet and the loud – and I’ve always wanted to do it.”

The chorus of album track ‘Commenter’s seems as good a phrase as any to sum up The Hurry and The Harm, and indeed the point at which Dallas Green finds himself – a man comfortable and confident in the work he has produced and putting the necessary pieces in place to follow his own path. The phrase came as a reaction to a magazine articles celebrating ‘The Most Revolutionary Act for a Decade’. “I looked at it and thought, Fuck, I don’t want to be revolutionary… and it fitted with the melody I had been working on. George from Alexisonfire used to say that just because you can make a pickled milkshake doesn’t mean that it is going to be good… I think people get caught up in that whole issue of ‘no-one’s done it before’ – “look we’ve added electronic beats to screamo music”. But they never ask the question ‘is it good?’- they just do it. So that line sums it up. I don’t want to be revolutionary. I am just looking for a sweet melody. That sums up what I’m looking for in a song. And I don’t care if someone thinks all the songs sound the same. That’s great. They sound like me.”

Despite its sweet, lilting melody, lyrically ‘Commenters’ calls out faceless and nameless commenters on the Internet for being nothing but a bunch of amateur commentators/who live your lives hiding behind a wall of insecurities. “Yeah…it’s my diss song” Green begins with a grin. “It is really written in three parts. The first verse was more to make my wife happy, because people say the worst things about her on the internet- she’s a TV personality in Canada and people say the meanest things right to her- tweet them right to her. It’s disgusting what somebody thinks they can say to somebody else. But they aren’t saying it to them – just these little, dark, insecure people sitting behind a computer screen hitting send. That’s fucked. That shouldn’t happen. But it happens all the time…sometimes I’ll be checking out a video of us… you know, checking if my hat looked cool… and people will start arguing over what guitar I’m using. And they’re both wrong but then it escalates and becomes racist and homophobic… how did we get here? It’s scary, because this is our next generation, these are the people who are going to be apparently running the world in 20-30 years and it’s terrifying. People should be out enjoying their life instead of wasting their time being horrible to other people.”

“I’m fine if people don’t like my music. I’m fine with criticism and journalism as long as it’s constructive. We live in this world where everyone thinks they can go and stand in line for X-factor and become a star – it doesn’t matter if they ever sang or played an instrument or anything before, they just think that they can because their mom didn’t have the heart to tell them ‘you don’t sound good when you sing’. And the same as that, people think they are a writer now… you can start a blog and give the world a dire tribe about what you think about another person… People who were writers were writers. People who were singers were singers. People who were scientists were scientists. Imagine if you and I walked over to NASA right now and said we wanted to work for them. They’d ask what qualifications we had and we would say ‘None. I’ve just decided’. That would never happen. Music, journalism and photography now are the only things that everyone thinks that they can do.”

“It’s a progression, no one is telling me to do any of these things. I don’t understand why people get so bent out of shape about a band moving in a different direction. There are a lot of bands out there, if you don’t like something, then you can go and find something else new that you like, and try and have that same moment that you found with the band you used to likes last record. People forget. You might like this new record, but there are going to be people who feel the same way about this new record that you felt about the last one. When it comes down to it, if you look at the record it still says written and composed by Dallas Green.”

The Hurry and the Harm is available now via Dine Alone/Cooking Vinyl, and Dallas will play a sold out show at London’s Bush Hall on 05 June.