Way back at the beginning of the pandemic, while the world was in chaos, a stark black-and-white video captured the attention of many music lovers who were struggling with the sudden upheaval. July Talk’s “Pay For It” was almost prescient in its depictions of Canadian city life and heart-wrenching hospital scenes (including masks), and preceded the release of Pray For It, their third studio album after four years. However, touring that album became virtually impossible, so the band returned to writing as they waited for live music venues to reopen. The result was a new album, Remember Never Before, less than three years later, which again presages the world coming out of isolation and rejoicing in live music again.
We caught up with Peter Dreimanis and Leah Fay in the midst of their current tour, as they cross Canada playing iconic music venues including the Commodore in Vancouver, Toronto’s Massey Hall, and tonight at the National Arts Centre.
The gap between albums from 2016 to 2020 was a long time for fans to wait, and then this new one came out just over two years later. Is that a product of being cooped up and not being able to go out on the road as much as you wanted to, so you just got back to writing?
There’s a lot that went on between those years. First, we had a big change in management and label. We finished recording Pray For It at the end of 2018. These things take some time, and then all of a sudden we released the album in a global pandemic. Who knows if it was the best idea to release, or whether we should have waited until things calmed down a bit, because July 2020, I’m sure you can go back and remember, it was a time of just total chaos and terror and there was a raging pandemic killing people and no end in sight, and there was no vaccine. So it was a weird time to put an album out.
And then as soon as it made sense for us to get together in studio and bubble up and be safe, we started coming together and writing for the record. A lot of the demos became the main tracks on the record. We just had a lot of pent-up energy and wanted to make something really different than what we released in 2020. By the time we were writing for Remember Never Before, some of the ideas were older, but we wanted to write an album for the stage. We were missing that. Pray for It was more a studio record. This one is putting our own experience of our live show on a pedestal from inside a cage, and yearning for that energy.
It’s also recognizing our responsibility. When you watch frontline workers and people that get up in the morning with a purpose and matter to our whole social experiment that we’re all a part of, I think that the pandemic caused us to stop and say: Okay, what are we actually needed for? And for us, it’s going from town to town and bringing optimism—thoughtful, dogged optimism.
It must be challenging, in that you want to write about the experience of the pandemic, but at the same time, when you perform it on stage, fans are looking for an escape, and you want to give them a chance to let loose, enjoy and forget about that.
I think we accidentally wrote our pandemic record with Pray For It, because we felt so absorbed and felt so much about what was going on in the world between 2016 and 2020. It was a pretty dark, hopeless, despairing time. We didn’t really write too much about our experience of living through the pandemic for Remember Never Before. It was more about realizing how easy it is to succumb to despair, and what it means to radically and actively choose hope and love for the future. Because it’s either that, or self-destruct.
While there are the expected rocking July Talk songs, there are a few that seem more vulnerable, including “Hold” and “Raw”.
“Raw” is a song that I’ve never written before. I often come back to a Bob Dylan quote about “Tangled Up in Blue,” where the song took him 10 years to live and two years to write. And I liked the idea of how long it took you to live a song, and I don’t have a choice in the matter. I happen to be more of a confessional songwriter, and that song took me like 14 years to live it, and it took me two and a half minutes to write. It just sort of poured out. It was so bizarre. I’ve never really had an experience like it.
It was more about realizing how easy it is to succumb to despair, and what it means to radically and actively choose hope and love for the future. Because it’s either that, or self-destruct.
I think the motivation to put it on the record was that it felt like the whole record is about bringing out your human side, be your freaky self. Like on “When You Stop”: “you find out what you’re running from.” It’s asking a lot of the audience. It’s telling the audience to put themselves out there and be brave and vulnerable. So it felt like “Raw” was a necessary thing to put our money where our mouth is, and just say, you should go do these things without being invested in doing that for ourselves.
And on this tour, because we’re playing such iconic, beautiful-sounding rooms, Peter had this idea to sing it without a microphone, screaming the lyrics with no accompaniments. He sings most of it and then goes into it on piano with me and Dani Nash singing backing vocals.
Be sure not to miss July Talk at the National Arts Centre tonight, April 10, at 8pm, with support from Crown Lands. A handful of tickets remain available here.
