He’s racked up writing credits for Kali Uchis and Stray Kids and earned a spot on WondaGurl’s label roster, but when it came time for Toronto pop alchemist Chris LaRocca to make his debut artist album, he looked to a decidedly less au courant influence. “I was listening to a lot of Say Anything,” LaRocca tells Apple Music, referring to the 2000s LA emo linchpins who soundtracked his adolescence. “In 2007, they put out In Defense of the Genre, a 27-track album where every song was so different. I wanted to try that out. Because this is my first album, I was thinking, 'Where can I go from here?'” The answer: pretty much everywhere. i cried my eyes out condenses 60 years of pop history into 13 genre-obliterating tracks that connect the dots between Roy Orbison and The Weeknd, Bon Iver and Post Malone. But what began as a series of writing exercises to keep his chops up during the pandemic gradually cohered around lyrical motifs that address the emotional fallout of a long-term relationship and the existential crises that plagued many musicians at the time. “I look at this project like a color wheel,” he says. “They're all different colors, but they all meet in the center.” Here, LaRocca reveals the many shades of his soul, track by track. “difficult” “I was building out a sample pack, so my friend [Toronto soul singer] LOONY came over and we wrote the topline and lyric together. I sent it to a lot of people like Sean Leon, who really liked it. But when I saw how much people around me responded to this short piece of music, I thought, 'I'm gonna take it back to myself and just use it as an intro.' The piece had always been called 'difficult,' and I just thought, ‘What a great way to set up a theme for this album, which was difficult to make!'” “like u” “I was dating this girl from Ohio and was traveling between the States and Toronto. I definitely felt like I was letting her down a lot by not being available, and that's where this song found its theme.” “breakup coach” “This was written when I broke up with my girlfriend of five years. But we were still really close friends. So it was really bizarre to me that I used to be so intimate with this person and all of a sudden we were coaching each other through a breakup. She would talk to me about guys, and I would talk to her about girls—we were just so close as human beings and friends that our opinions still meant so much to each other.” “i cried my eyes out” “In September 2021, I was about to go to LA for two months. And all my family's birthdays are in October. So I was about to take off and miss all these get-togethers. And in my mind, I was thinking, 'How many more times am I gonna let my family down just to chase my dream?' So this is like an apology to them. I felt like I really nailed the theme of this project, and ended up naming it after the song.” “deep end” “I was having a jam session with some friends and we were writing a totally different song. We didn't know what we were going to do with it, but the beat was cool, and the more I lived with it, I thought, 'I'd like to change this and make it my own.' So I rewrote all the lyrics to just talk about how much us artists put ourselves through physically and mentally—the lack of sleep, the lack of eating, the smoking, the vices, and all the things that come along with that lifestyle.” “life of the party” “I wrote this after I first met WondaGurl. This was in the middle of COVID and I hadn't really been interacting with people too much, but then I found myself in LA, where it was like the Wild West—people didn't really care about what was happening in the world, and nothing was really shut down the way it was in Canada. So this song is kind of a sarcastic approach to that term 'life of the party.' I was attending a bunch of parties and working in studios, but I felt like I didn't even know how to interact with people.” “linger" “I had borrowed a friend's acoustic guitar, and I was listening to a lot of Dijon and Bon Iver at the time, so I was trying to channel them. I wrote about some childhood trauma and some things from my past that I've carried with me my whole life. Like, I'm singing about the clouds and letting them linger, in the sense that you can never really get rid of your past and kind of have to live with it. I was feeling really down that week and felt like maybe if I got it out in a song, I'd feel better about it.” “gloria” “This is about the babysitter I had as a kid—her name was Gloria. During COVID, [Canadian performer-rights organization] SOCAN set up these writing sessions, and I was put on a Zoom call with [Hamilton singer-songwriter] Ellis, who's incredible. We ended up on this common theme of babysitters and how naive you are as a kid, and how your life changes so much from having to be cared for by someone to becoming an adult. So I thought, 'What would the conversation be with my babysitter now if I were to talk to them?' And that's where that song came from: I'm thanking Gloria for being there for me when my family was busy, and allowing me to explore life as a child.” “switch” “I was talking to this girl for about a month, and then she just kind of disappeared on me. So this song was kind of like what I would say to her...though we weren't that close that I would actually say these things to her! But this song came out of a last-ditch effort to say, ‘Before you change your mind, this is how I feel.’” “left out” “A lot of my music leading up to this project was centered around that relationship I was in for five years—all the highs and the lows. When I wrote this song, we had been broken up for a year, but we were both from the same small town just outside of Toronto and we shared a lot of common friends, so on social media, I'd still see our worlds combined. It's weird to see all these people, places, and things I used to be a part of, and now I can't do it anymore because we've broken up and things have changed.” “bad” “This was the first song I wrote for this whole project, back in 2016. It's about the same person I wrote ‘left out’ and ‘breakup coach’ about, and this is from the very happy phase with that person in my life. But there were a lot of differences between us: Her family was super well-off, and my family was pretty average and middle-class. So it's a song of love and fear at the same time—I was very much in the relationship, but coming to terms with the fact that anything could change at any time because we were so young and our lives were so different.” “troubadours” “My therapist said to me: Artists these days are like the troubadours of medieval times—they were so young, and women loved them, and they put all of this stuff in their art, and they were loved on the surface, but no one really understood them beyond that. A lot of them ended up committing suicide, because of the hollowness of their lives. And that idea really resonated with me. I wanted to put that into a song. I hadn't really thought about how I was going to sing it yet. But there was a song on that Say Anything album, ‘That Is Why,’ which is very baroque, and I felt like I wanted a song like that on my project. It's such a beautiful tone to have on this record, because it cleanses the palate before 'because of u.'” “because of u” “This is the farewell to the person that I had been with for five years, and I felt like the musical setting should be very Roy Orbision/Lana Del Rey/Orville Peck. It's really a thank-you to a long relationship for teaching me how to love and how to move forward as a human being and love other people. You always have to have that first love to learn how to act accordingly in the future.”