"It's the difference between mumbling in a corner something you think a lot of people should hear, and standing on a stage in the middle of a room and saying it at the top of your lungs," says Dears principal Murray Lightburn. "I like to employ that method of a really strong melody played in unison between the cello and the violins, and having maybe three octaves playing the same line. It's really strong and rich. You throw a big, fat stage reverb on that, and it's really huge."
Elsewhere in our conversation he offers the adjective that sits like the elephant in the room: The Dears' rock is epic. Influenced, Lightburn says, by Motown, The Smiths, and classic French pop, it swells with drama, feeling, and textures born of the orchestra pit. For all the strings and horns, it's hardly easy listening.
Lightburn's six-member, Montreal-based collective recently saw the long-awaited U.S. release of its second album, No Cities Left, which came out in Canada in 2003. Although the delay involved label frustrations, promoting last year's record now has afforded The Dears a welcome break from writing their next one. Seems there's nothing easy about any of it.
"This album was written out of a huge sadness that I felt deep in my spirit," says Lightburn. "You just feel so sad. You try to laugh but then you immediately go back to crying." He laughs as he says it, but I suspect he's alluding to a very real personal tragedy he mentioned earlier-losing a family member in the attacks of September 11, 2001. "It forced me to reevaluate what we wanted to say, because we were just starting to write the album at that time."
Lightburn's lyrics are the stuff of writing prizes, and to listen at face value is to conjure four walls and a pair of wounded hearts. The singer, however, had a larger population in mind. "I became genuinely concerned for my fellow human beings on this album," he says. "I think we're all looking for that force of light, but there's this enormous dark energy that tries to steer us away from that."
The album largely dwells in that dim place, but as Lightburn puts it, "The thought on No Cities Left is definitely to be continued... So if it seems like a dark-over-light thing, it's sort of like The Empire Strikes Back."
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