Photo credit: Colin Medley
Andy Shauf will play the Back Room at Colectivo at 8 p.m. Friday, March 6, with Molly Sarlé.
As Andy Shauf wrote songs for his latest album, The Neon Skyline, the Toronto-based singer-songwriter realized he needed to go beyond the clichés of a typical breakup album. He needed to capture a more true-to-life approach that focused on the humanity and humor of a post-breakup world.
“[My last album, The Party,] was so focused on emotion, and everything was a little bit weighted and heavy. I kind of looked at my life, and that's not really what my life is like,” says Shauf. “There are those moments of looking into yourself and examining your feelings and stuff; But it's usually—for me—balanced with humor.”
“Like if I’m hanging out with my friends, we’re not just deep in conversation. It’s mostly little jokes and those kinds of subtle things. So, on this one, I wanted to balance it a little bit more and use humor and try to make it feel a little bit more real and human-like than someone who's just sad and deep and somber all the time.”
Writing the songs on guitar instead of piano helped achieve that goal. “When I write on piano, I end up with a lot of space, and everything kind of feels heavy, and that makes the lyrics go that way,” Shauf explains. “Writing with guitar was a way to take away the weight, because there’s more rhythm happening, and you're conscious of the rhythm at the same time. It just kind of lends itself to being a little bit more peppy. So, it can sound a little more lighthearted, and that was something that I wanted to explore a little bit.”
The Neon Skyline is also a more fully realized concept album compared to The Party, an album that followed guests at a party. While the concept for The Party revealed itself midway through the process, this time he knew right away that he wanted to create a fully fleshed-out story. The album follows a narrator who goes to his neighborhood bar, finds out that his ex is back in town, and she eventually shows up.
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“I ended up kind of writing it as I went,” says Shauf, “but I started at least knowing that I wanted to make a more cohesive and tighter narrative and just follow one person instead of having it be small vignettes.”
Like his previous work, his stories are very observational and detail-oriented with colorful characters. As he says, “life is mostly details.” For Shauf, the small details in life can be very interesting and revealing.
“When I'm writing songs, it's a lot of trying to paint a picture of what's happening,” says Shauf. “So, sometimes, those small details are the most important parts. They're the things that maybe are overlooked, but it helped to kind of shape the picture of what's happening.”
For example, on the opening title track, the narrator invites a friend out for beers: “I said, ‘Come to the Skyline, I’ll be washing my sins away.’ He just laughed, said, ‘I’ll be late, you know how I can be.’”
Shauf attributes his strong interest in creating story-based songs to listening to songwriters such as Randy Newman. “Randy Newman wrote small details and little things that you notice, but you don't really notice them until you hear them pointed out,” he says.
While the stories are fictional, he often used his own experiences as a basis. “A lot of those songs incorporates some sort of memory into a story or something that happened, and it's just a minor detail that would end up influencing a part of the story or how the story would work,” says Shauf. “A lot of it is fictional, but a lot of it is pulled from my experiences to make it feel real. And the only way I could really do that was if it was real to me. So, some of the stuff is pretty straight from my life, and a lot of it is exaggerated.”
Shauf wanted to have the narrator on the album find direction post breakup.
“At the point where I realized that it was going to be a breakup record, I wanted to not just explore the breakup and be sad about it,” he says. “But I feel like when that happens to me, there’s always a period of… you want to try to make it work, and you regret all the bad things that happened, and you only think about the good things and focus on those.”
“You just end up in a pattern of repetition. And I just wanted to focus on that a little bit and tried to make this character sort of realize that, in those scenarios, I think there’s more of a need for change than a need for repetition.”
Towards the end of the album, the narrator is at peace with the breakup. “I think that there’s realization that this thing happened and it didn’t work out, but it isn’t the end of the world,” Shauf concludes. “New things will come; things will keep changing. Life is always kind of refreshing itself.”
Andy Shauf will play the Back Room at Colectivo at 8 p.m. Friday, March 6, with Molly Sarlé. For tickets and more information, visit pabsttheater.org.
