Released in October 2019, City and Colour’s sixth full-length, A Pill for Loneliness, became their fourth record to go to No. 1 in Canada, sending Dallas Green and company on a cross-Canada arena tour that fall. But this was no time for celebration. Just weeks before the record’s release, Green’s close friend and collaborator, producer Karl Bareham, died in a scuba-diving mishap while the band was touring Australia. And by the time Green embarked on a solo acoustic tour of Europe in February 2020, the grief had become all-consuming. And this was how he felt before the pandemic plunged the entire world into a depressive funk mere weeks later. Green began to process his loss the only way he knew how: by picking up his acoustic guitar and baring his soul. “I had written the songs and knew where I wanted them to be,” he tells Apple Music. So, I knew this was just going to be some people sitting in a room playing, with the mics in front of us, and I was gonna try to get all this stuff off my chest.” And after his other band, Alexisonfire, made their triumphant return with 2022’s Otherness, Green felt all the more emboldened to finally put these intensely personal songs out into the world. “I wanted to celebrate the Alexis thing before sharing this batch of songs,” he says. “But I was pretty overjoyed making this record, too. I don’t think it’s a sad record. I think it’s about finding your way through it.” Here, Green provides his track-by-track guide back to the light. “Meant to Be” “I was born and raised Catholic, I went to Catholic school—and then I graduated and didn’t look back too much. I’ve always used a lot of religious imagery in my songs because it’s in my craw—it’s hard to unlearn all the stuff you’ve learned. So, I think I’ve always had a little bit of an inquisitive approach to it. I didn’t specifically set out to write a religious song here, and I didn’t really set out to write a song about what I was dealing with. But I knew they were going to intersect at some point, just because of the life I’ve had. So, this song is eulogizing my friend, but also questioning things that I’ve been taught.” “Underground” “I’ve always tried to use my time wisely and appreciate the life I’ve been given. It’s not lost on me that there could be a higher power in charge of all of this. But I’ve never lived my life assuming that there is one. ‘Underground’ is about being faced with the fragility of life head-on and trying to appreciate every minute that goes by.” “Fucked It Up” “I really wanted to lean into writing a playful song about the trials and tribulations of being in a long-term relationship. I was thinking, ‘How do you answer the questions that arise?’ It’s almost impossible. So, let me try to put it into a three-and-a-half-minute song where you get to swear!” “The Love Still Held Me Near” “There’s a bunch of direct songs on this record, but then there’s ones like this that really cross paths between mourning my friend and mourning my relationship, and mourning the loss of everything that was going on in my life [during the pandemic]. My identity had disappeared, my livelihood had disappeared, my relationship had disappeared, my friend was gone—there was this overarching theme of loss that felt like it was being sewn into the fabric of my life. So, this song is like the intersection of all of those things and me trying to remain hopeful.” “A Little Mercy” “I could do stuff like this all day. One day, I’ll make a record that’s literally just an hour of this. I love playing the same two chords for six minutes while I just try to ruminate on something. In this case, it’s that idea of: Do we really have to suffer as much as we do in order to find balance? And does life really have to be about this balance where you get as much joy as you get sadness, and you can’t have one without the other?” “Things We Choose to Care About” “This is probably one of the most deeply personal songs on the record. I’ve been trying to write this one for a long time—I started writing it years ago. And I almost think that I had to go through what I’ve just been through in order to finish it, in order to truly understand why I was writing that chorus.” “After Disaster” “This one’s more rooted in the personal-relationship side of things. It’s almost like I was trying to write a Pink Floyd song mixed with a Teddy Pendergrass song. I was really just trying to sing it and get it off my chest, but there was something about that ominous groove we came up with—I just wanted to ride it. I’ll write a song like ‘Fucked It Up,’ and I’ll think, ‘Yeah, this is just a nice song with a nice chorus,’ and the song presents itself very easily. But ‘After Disaster’ is almost more like a mood. I like to try to make the song sound like what I’m singing about.” “Without Warning” “I was going through my computer for old demos, and I just stumbled upon this very basic piano melody for verse and chorus. I called my friend Matthew [Kelly], who produced the record with me, and basically said, ‘I’m gonna send you this really shitty half-of-a-demo, but can you make me a four-minute-long arrangement?’ So, he sends it back to me within a few hours, and then a few hours after that, I had written the whole song over it. I don’t know if I was consciously trying to make a soul song, but I’ve listened to enough of that music that I just let it be.” “Hard, Hard Time” “This song is very much questioning religion and the idea of living your life a certain way so that you can have a better afterlife and failing to recognize the one that’s directly in front of you. And I’m not trying to say that in an antagonistic way. I’m just stating the obvious, I think. Sonically, musically, and attitude-wise, I wanted the song to be very jovial and uplifting. What’s more joyful than a guitar solo?” “The Water Is Coming” “There’s a great book called A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. She studies a bunch of different disasters that have happened throughout human existence and theorizes that humans are only truly beautiful to one another in times of absolute disaster. I thought it was really brilliant. She has this line in the book where she talks about how so much of life is spent in this ‘if you won’t care for me, then I won’t care for you’ attitude that we have for one another. It’s quite a large conversation to try to put into a four-minute song, but I like doing that.” “Bow Down to Love” “This one was a specific reaction to being isolated and watching the news and the George Floyd story and all of the anger and hate, and seeing all the fear of the pandemic and just really feeling helpless for us. I wanted to write something rooted in compassion that could be the opposite of everything I was being exposed to.” “Begin Again” “I almost feel like ‘Bow Down to Love’ is the end of the record, and ‘Begin Again’ is this refrain at the end, almost like an epilogue. I think there’s a lot of positivity in that song—the idea of ‘I loved you once, but I’ll love you again.’ It didn’t seem right anywhere else but at the end. I still make records that way, where I need it to feel like a front-to-back experience. When I make a record, I’m trying to make a journey. And this song just felt like the end for me.”