Thirty years in, Murray Lightburn isn’t softening The Dears, he’s sharpening them. Led by the husband-and-wife duo of Lightburn and Natalia Yanchak, the Montreal art-rock outfit dropped their ninth album, Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful!, this past November, with videos for “Tomorrow and Tomorrow” and “Tears of a Nation” directed by Rachel McLean and Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene. The project trades the apocalyptic weight of Lovers Rock for something rarer and riskier: clarity, joy, and an unapologetic belief in light amid the chaos of the times. I had the chance to talk to the always fearless and deeply human Lightburn, who is less interested in legacy than in saying exactly what he means right now. Refreshing.
JG: Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful! is a hard pivot toward optimism after the apocalyptic weight of Lovers Rock. Why did joy feel like the right or necessary move now, 30 years into The Dears?
Murray Lightburn: I mean, it’s not a stretch for us, really. Embedded in our entire body of work is a hopefulness, you know? I would say that we’re just getting more articulate about precisely what we want to say. As you get older, you become more articulate about how you want to express yourself. That is, if you’re on a path of like evolution and not arrested development. I would say we’re always exploring what’s next as people, but also as an artistic entity. With that, I think comes a sharpened way of communicating, and I think also a fearlessness to say those things.
Not that we’ve ever been fearful, but I think in the past, we’ve maybe hidden behind more abstract ways of expression, with the hope that there’s a certain level of intelligence on the other side that people will, quote, unquote, “get it.” But then at the same time, we’ve also tried to balance that against leaving a lot of space for people to insert themselves into the work that we do. If we are to be too explicit and too referential, there’s no room for anyone to project themselves into the work.
In my travels as I meet people, they’ll take me aside, and they’ll be like: “This album saved my life. This song saved my life. This got me through this. This got me through that,” you know, et cetera, et cetera. And as I meet more and more people like that on the road and in my travels, and on the street when I walk around the city sometimes, or other cities, just like wherever, it happens more often than it should, honestly.
Now is absolutely the time to remind people that, despite all the distractions and despite things actually happening in your life that you think are just really weighing you down, there is light somewhere. Keep looking for that light and keep looking for the beauty in life. That’s what gets me up in the morning. That’s what keeps me going. And, am I just distracted by current events and the state of the world, et cetera? Of course, I am. I’m a human being, but I also have so many interactions in my daily life that bring me immense joy, that I’m grateful for, and I think a lot of people have that in their lives. I think this album is to help serve as that reminder in the face of everything that we have to deal with. You know what I’m saying? It’s a really long answer, I apologize.
JG: No, that’s good. I read that the album came together in just a month. Was that a reaction to current events and the heaviness of the time? Did all of that kind of spur on the making of the album?
Murray Lightburn: This week, I got my first glimmer of a new Dears song. So what will happen is, at some point when it’s too great to deny, I will put pen to paper, put something together, bank it, and move on. I’m not about to start making a Dears record at this moment, but the first kernel has entered into my sphere, and that’s how all the albums get made. It’s like there comes a time when you hear that first bit of music and you can’t stop hearing it. It always tells me, “Okay, I guess we’re making another one,” you know, at some point. That’s the thing that’s interesting to me, from our very first album, I didn’t know if we’d put out a second or a third or a fourth or a ninth, you know?
It’s really just coming from somewhere. There are no shareholders to keep happy. It just has to happen most organically. We can’t force ourselves to be like, “Okay, we gotta, we gotta get the…” It’s only when we have enough songs that we’ll be like, “Okay, when can we get together?” Then you’re trying to beat the clock in terms of all the external things. Is there a quarter this year that meets up with the label’s release schedule? We always ask, if we think an album’s coming down, we’ll go to the label and ask, “When would you see something coming out?” And then we can work backwards from there. As opposed to what I think a lot of younger bands will do, they’ll make an album, and then they’re in this massive rush to put it out. And they kind of force the label to get excited about it before they’re ready. That doesn’t make sense in our world anymore.
We want to get everybody on board in terms of the timing. This week, I’m thinking of a record, but this album will probably not come out for two or three years. It was the same thing with Life is Beautiful. I can’t tell you when the first song came into my brain, and the first kernels started bubbling up. But I knew when it was go time, when I was trying to beat the clock and had to really get into production mode. The ideas ferment for a long time, and then it’s like “Okay, let’s bang this out.” I guess what I’m saying is we spend a lot of time on writing, design, and blueprinting, as I like to call it.
We blueprint the entire project visually. We bring in a graphic artist pretty early in the game. We bring in a photographer, videographers, and all the pieces. Then, when we go to the label and are like, “We think we have a project. What timing works for you? We’ll have three videos. We’ll have photos. How does this work for you?” That’s how we operate. We’ve been operating like that for the last 10 years at least. It wasn’t like that at first, but when we started to understand the cycle and the way we work, and also just how the biz works, it really doesn’t make sense to try to force or strong-arm anybody to release an album before they’re ready. It’s nice to get everybody in the pool, and then go all together. Everybody turns their keys at the same time, and off we go. At the same time that we were engaging the graphic person and photographer and et cetera, all that stuff, we were booking the studio. Booking the musicians. Everything was laid out. I was working with a copyist, getting them ready for the session.
JG: Your score for Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story earned you a Canadian Screen Award. How has your work in film and television influenced your work with The Dears, if at all?
Murray Lightburn: It’s funny because my work in film and TV has actually really helped me become more disciplined in Dears production. Because, as a producer, it’s just another deadline. And we needed to get everything done by a certain day, so we booked the mastering. Before we even went into the studio, the mastering was booked because we knew it takes a certain amount of time to get that. You don’t make the record and then book the mastering. You book the mastering because you’re trying to meet that final day: “Okay, the album’s finished.”
So you work backwards from there production-wise. Book the musicians, you know how long it’s gonna take to mix, et cetera, et cetera. The post-production, all that shit. That’s just how I work now. It’s extremely fastidious, extremely. It really speaks to my level of OCD in a way. I like to have everything buttoned down to the letter. I don’t like to leave anything to chance. I like to be in complete control of the schedule to allow for contingencies if catastrophes come up.
JG: I’ve seen you describe yourself as someone who overwrites, generating far more material than you need. At this stage of your career, how do you recognize when restraint is the stronger creative choice?
Murray Lightburn: When we first came up, you weren’t really constrained so much by the running time of an album, so the first few albums were longer. Except for the first one. No Cities Left was 66 minutes, and Missiles was super long. Like my God. That policy is gone. Now it’s just what fits on a vinyl, like ’80s or ’60s style. The running time that fits on vinyl comfortably and sounds good. That’s usually around between 30 and 35 minutes. You can push it a little bit.
That’s where we’re at now. We know we need about 10 to 12 songs total. It’s always good to write more than that, because you just never know. You never know how they all get along together. When we were doing Life Is Beautiful, I thought it was all done, but I realized that we were missing that first track. All the Dears’ albums start in a very specific way. They start with a lyric that sets you up from the get. They have a musical intro that sets the tone. Sometimes they’re long, sometimes they’re short, but there’s a certain quality. I can’t explain it exactly. I had a whole bunch of other songs, and none of them worked as a first song for the record. And then “Gotta Get My Head Right” came together, and it was perfect. It did all the things that it should do.
One of the things that we do is a sort of two-movement song where it’s, like, two songs put together, but they’re meant to be together. “Gotta Get My Head Right” is one of those songs. And it really came together quickly. It wasn’t a battle at all. It just all made sense. It was like the perfect piece of the puzzle, and it belonged there. It doesn’t really speak to your question about restraint. I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s less about restraint or whatever. It’s more about recognizing, as soon as possible, precisely what you are making and doing the work.
It’s like construction. You know, a wall is built with studs that are separated 16 inches apart from each other. All of these things go into the making of a record. Once you know the design, it’s a cakewalk making it. It’s not hard. The hardest part is knowing what the design is. The design of the work is paramount, and we really spend a lot of time designing things.
JG: You’ve long been compared to Morrissey, sometimes even dubbed “the Black Morrissey.” How do you feel about that label today?
Murray Lightburn: I don’t know. I don’t really care. There was a period of time when I was younger when it bothered me a lot. And then it became a running joke, and now I just don’t care at all. Like, I just really don’t give a shit. But Morrissey’s fans still have a little thing about the Black Morrissey sometimes, you know, in their little chat things. It pops up every once in a while, but it’s not something that I spend a lot of time on at all, if any. I don’t hear it a lot anymore, either. What’s so funny is that, number one, I was always a bigger fan of Johnny Marr and his guitar work and his musical work in the Smiths than I ever was of Morrissey.
I just think that’s funny to me. Like, if I had to be one of those guys, it would be Johnny Marr. I would rather be the producer and guitar player. That’s what I do, even in The Dears. I don’t think a lot of people recognize that. I probably have more in common with Johnny Marr than I do with Morrissey. So it’s kind of funny. I’d rather be the Black Johnny Marr, if I had my choice.
Having said all that, my favourite band of all time is probably Roxy Music, which is even funnier. If I were trying to sound like anything, it’s Roxy Music. They were this weird-ass band, kind of pop, kind of experimental, especially their stuff in the ’70s. A weird-ass singer, you know. They’re a bunch of white guys from England, but musically, that’s way more kindred to The Dears than The Smiths are. Really, it’s just because we had that song “Lost in the Plot” that sounded like a Smiths song. We like to do the jingle jangle every once in a while. We do one on every album, and “Lost in the Plot” was on our 2003 album No Cities Left. But everything else doesn’t sound anything like The Smiths. The Smiths would never do a song like “Never Destroy Us” or “Deep in My Heart” on the last record. They would never do anything like that. It’s just bizarre to me. It’s just laziness, you know?
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