Vanessa Heins
Dallas Green with cardigan sweater.
Dallas Green of City and Colour.
Dallas Green has never shied away from vulnerable, honest lyricism. His knack for exploring his emotions resonates with listeners, offering a sense of connection. His evocative voice can make the most personal lyrics feel universal. It’s part of what’s attracted a loyal fan base to the Canadian singer-songwriter’s brand of indie rock since he started performing as City and Colour almost two decades ago.
City and Colour’s seventh studio album, The Love Still Held Me Near, finds Green navigating a devastating period of grief and loss following the death of his best friend and producer Karl Bareham in a scuba diving accident and then a cousin who had been part of his first band. In the process, Dallas Green discovered a newfound sense of hope in a tragic situation.
“I started to dive headfirst into the idea of writing a record that could work as a coping mechanism for me and hopefully for somebody else,” Green says. City and Colour will be performing most of The Love Still Held Me Near live for the first time during their upcoming spring tour, which includes a stop at The Sylvee on May 5 at 8 p.m.
“It’s always nice to go out and play new songs but I do feel something a little different about this group of songs,” Green says. “It feels like there’s a lot of hope permeating through these songs and I’m excited to play them live and hopefully spark that connection you’re looking for.”
Music has been an emotional outlet for Green since he began writing songs in high school. Cutting his teeth on everything from grunge and emo to Neil Young and Jeff Buckley, Green found special inspiration listening to vulnerable men singing about their feelings — an honesty that he’s embraced since City and Colour’s first album, 2005’s Sometimes.
“I didn’t necessarily think many people would hear it, so I wasn’t afraid of writing in that fashion,” Green says. “Then when it came out and a lot of people took to it, that made me even more confident that was an okay place to unfurl what was going on inside of me.”
In almost two decades since Sometimes, City and Colour has been Green’s outlet to reckon with more personal subject matter in a way that he can’t in his other project, post-hardcore band Alexisonfire. “I really love screaming and jumping around, and all the things we do at an Alexis show, but I also love just standing in the middle of the stage and singing about my feelings,” Green says.
“Begin Again,” the ballad that would become The Love Still Held Me Near’s triumphant closer, was the first song he wrote for the album. “When I started writing that song, I was in a pretty bad place with it all,” he says. His return to songwriting coincided with Alexisonfire reuniting to tour and release their first full-length album in over 10 years, 2022’s Juno Award-winning Otherness.
“I went through a seven-month-long creative explosion that started in summer of 2020,” Green says. “Once I remembered how important writing is to me — just on a cellular level, not as something I do for a living — that was where it all started pouring out.”
The Love Still Held Me Near blends elements that fall under the City and Colour banner. The 12 tracks feature the familiar raw and emotionally bare lyrics of early City and Colour, coupled with the musicianship and studio prowess of later records. While album opener “Meant to Be” serves as a heartbreaking elegy for his friend Bareham, tracks like “Underground” offer reassurance that life is a gift.
Despite tackling heavy subject matter, there’s a unifying thread of hope that runs through the record. With the sense of hope at the heart of “Begin Again,” Green saw it as the logical final track. “All the songs are about going through something and finding your way through it,” Green says. “Not dwelling in it but finding your way through it.”
As a musician who’s always found value in writing and creating something out of pain, he points to the album’s creation as an integral part of healing for his bandmates as well: “I think it ended up becoming a communal moment where we could all grieve, in a way, together.”
