Have you ever read the book or seen the film High Fidelity? If you haven’t, I suggest you take a personal development day tomorrow and indulge yourself. To sum it up in one sentence; the protagonist, Rob Gordan, tries to find answers as to why the women of his life always end up leaving, all the while, obsessing over pop music and learning life lessons as he proceeds through his reveleation.

 

I would like to lie to you and tell you this record is more than that. I would like to tell you it’s a concept album about human virtue or the ideologies of love and art, but it’s not. It’s a simple character study that ended up teaching me more about myself than anything.

 

Every song is about a girl. For better or worse. Some were lovers, some were friends, some were neither. I guess you could say what ties them together is that they were all influential and I felt I needed to talk about our story.

 

I don’t know how to talk about my feelings so I write songs. One morning I made a list of names. I wrote about these names without a filter or without an agenda and then I put simple melodies behind the words and gave them a vehicle. The entire process took over three years to complete.

 

I worked with a producer and we selected songs from my oversized list. We whittled them down and meticuously edited to abide by the laws of pop music.

 

To be honest, it was more about the words than the music. The words were the message and music was my most accessible medium.

 

When I sang the songs in the studio I relieved every story. Once they were complete it felt like the stories were over. They didn’t haunt me anymore. They no longer belonged to me.

 

I recorded this album for me and I’m happy that I did. It now seems self-indulgent and petty to dedicate an entire album to personal failure. This just means that the process was a success. I needed to share these stories.

 

I think my next record will be about human rights, nautre and beauty in strange places. I may ride my bike across Canada to tour it.