Lifting the haze

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This article was published 27/10/2018 (2850 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canadian folk singer-songwriter Reuben Bullock is living the dream.

Over a three-year period, the 33-year-old Calgarian pulled inspiration from his subconscious self, grabbing lines and melodies as they came to him in the hazy state between sleep and wake.

What resulted is Arms of a Dream, the sophomore effort from the Bullock-fronted band Reuben and the Dark, which was released in May. Sonically, Reuben and the Dark expands a bit here, creating bigger anthemic moments with lush instrumentations, embracing the polish that comes with more time spent on production. But they are still an indie-folk outfit at their core, and that remains present in the rawness of the lyrics and quieter melodic moments.

Bullock chatted with the Free Press earlier this week, one day before the band’s fall tour kicked off in Ann Arbor, Mich., about the new record and searching for subconscious inspiration.

Free Press: Can we start with the origin story of this record? I read that you had been writing songs for something like three years?

Reuben Bullock: I was trying to make this next record and I just started writing, writing without any kind of direction, just to see what I could write and that opened up this world, this huge world that I kind of got lost in for a long time. Arms of a Dream was the first point that I decided that I needed to reel in all of these songs that I was writing and what that title represents for me is the place that I was writing from, which is a connection to being awake and being asleep, the spot in between where it seems like a lot of artistic stuff comes from. Where you’re not sure where it’s coming from, but you’re trying to not have your eyes closed or open and just kind of in that hazy state where you can grab ideas. So I tried to put as many of these songs together that were created in that way, kind of created from a bit of a subconscious place.

FP: Sounds like a very intuitive process.

RB: Yeah, because the more I started writing, I was like, “You can write a song and think of a clever chorus and fine,” but the ones that really moved me are the ones that came from somewhere, the ones I felt I didn’t understand them. I’m always really intrigued by those ones, the ones that come easily without my own ego behind them, because then I spend the next couple of years trying to figure out what they mean while I’m playing them. So that title has been in my head for a really long time, it was an old poem I had written, so when I had decided that was going to be it, I plugged all the songs into it based on that title.

FP: So when you write in that way, I can only assume you would amass a huge amount of content that you then have to sift through. How was the paring-down process for you? Was there some kind of criteria you followed to make those cuts to get the 11 tracks on the album?

RB: It was a number of things, but mostly it was I wanted it to represent me, I guess, and the different things I had been going through, and the songs that all felt the same way, and I don’t even know what that feeling is. Some of them are really old, like old ideas from when I first started four years ago, one of the songs was written the last day we were in the recording studio. It was again just one of those really intuitive procedures.

FP: You mentioned pulling inspiration from that in-between state of consciousness, but are you a vivid dreamer?

RB: Well that’s kind of what began this different practice, because I believe that I am quite a dreamer but I don’t remember my dreams. Except occasionally I’d go back to sleep in the morning for an hour and I’d be sucked into this really surreal and vivid dream full of details and really dramatic stories and I’d wake up and be like, “Holy shit!” But that’s the only time I would remember a dream. And I had been waking up just so differently on so many different mornings, like I would be exhausted but I slept really well, other times I would feel light and full of joy and I knew I was experiencing all these things in a dream world but just had no recollection, so the album was me trying to dig into that and figure out what that place is that holds me every night in my sleep and try to bring it to my own world because I think it was maybe an absence of remembering dreams this record is trying to write them out.

FP: Do you feel like you were successful in figuring things out?

RB: I think the concept is just going to be an ongoing thing with me. With a lot of these songs I’m learning a lot, I’m getting taught by the things that I’ve written that I didn’t think about too much before I wrote them, I just kind of channelled them onto a piece of a paper and they ended up on the record. And now I’m singing them every day, I’m touring them and I think that is what’s really come out, that there were a lot of things I needed to tell myself and I did it through song and I did it without really paying attention, and now I’m having to deal with all of the content that I wrote about which is really interesting. Some of it is great and insightful and some of it is like, “OK, you might have some problems.”

FP: There are some pretty big moments on this album, sonically speaking, which is new for you; was this something you had the intention of exploring from the get-go?

RB: I’m always trying to get the most out of a song and I’ve never really known how to do it, so in the back of my mind I always want a song to sound massive and anthemic, but it’s very difficult to do that and it’s really easy to go a different way, which I’ve done a lot. So this was one time where I intentionally decided to go for it, see if we could make songs and sounds like that. And part of that, too, is, I went to L.A. for a little while and was trying something out, I was writing so much in so many different directions, I ended up in a room writing for some television shows and movies, and I got to step away from my own process and was like, “Oh I’ll just write some kind of dramatic song for a trailer for this movie.” And a bunch of those ideas ended up going on the record. But originally, they were intentionally written to be super dramatic and didn’t have anything to do with the record, but it kind of opened that up.

FP: It’s interesting how professional diversions like that can actually end up being super inspiring and refreshing for your personal projects.

RB: Yeah, definitely, it’s something I would never have brought into the studio had I not been sitting and working on that with a different producer. It was a really nice way for those two worlds to collide.

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @NireRabel