NYC-based dream-pop artist Chris Garneau steps out of the emotional fog and straight into the light on In Reverse, his most intimate, cinematic and evolutionary album to date, out today via The Orchard and Rough Trade Publishing. Built from the ashes of a toxic relationship and a scrapped album, the tight eight-song collection trades chaos for clarity and transforms survival mode into something gentler, sexier, and startlingly human. I had the pleasure of chatting with Garneau about giving way to softness, songwriting, and more.
JG: Let’s dive in! In Reverse feels obsessed in a good way with the moment when survival gives way to softness. Do you remember the exact point in your life where you realized you didn’t need to brace anymore and could just be present?
Chris Garneau: When I was making my second-to-last record, The Kind, which came out exactly five years ago. It was a record that I felt like I really had to make in order to move on with my life. My father had just passed. It was a year of COVID. There were all these big life moments for me, and I think moving out of that into newer music and stuff that started to make up In Reverse, there was a whole other record that I was working on before In Reverse that I essentially scrapped.
The reason I did so was that the songs from that were feeling really drained and exhausted. I could hear that it was barely surviving, but it didn’t feel like living. I think once I moved out of the relationship that I was in, which was very unhealthy, and I was facing some mental instability and darkness in that relationship, those earlier songs that I was making were all kind of enmeshed with that time of my life.
Once I was able to abandon those and started coming out of that relationship, that’s when that shift from survival into softness and into presence really started happening. And it was really just a clarity. It was really like I felt free, I felt liberated, and I had spent so much time living in the past and not really being present. And so, the beginning of making these songs really just set that path for me. But it was really important, everything that came before it. That’s why I’m talking about the album before and all of the songs that I made that I scrapped, because they all led to this presence and softness.
JG: Did you feel like there was maybe a weight lifted off your shoulders when you were able to let go of that relationship, but also that album of material?
Chris Garneau: The first song that I wrote for In Reverse was “Off The Ring,” which came out as a single a few months ago. I wrote it just as that relationship was ending. That was the first breath and feeling of weight being lifted. Because that song, for me, was absolutely about letting go. It was about the ring metaphorically being a fighting ring or a boxing ring, and to be able to let myself go and my former partner from that dynamic. I think what I love about that song is that it’s definitely a breakup song, but it feels very peaceful to me. It feels like an agreement, like an extension of peace.
JG: I wanted to touch on the title track of In Reverse. You’ve described it as a “quiet victory” and a recognition rather than a dramatic turning point. As a songwriter, was it challenging to make stillness and calm feel as emotionally charged as, like, heartbreak and chaos?
Chris Garneau: It’s funny how “In Reverse” was written because I think it begins with that process that you’re talking about. For me, as a songwriter, the first goal is honesty. I’ve always understood, not that I’ve always been able to do this, but I’ve always understood that the most honest you can be in a lyric will often be the strongest work. The opening line of that song is, “Oh, I loved all the things I hurt.” Not, “I hurt all the things I loved,” you know, the inverse, which is an important distinction. And that’s an admission that we all make mistakes. We all hurt people. We don’t necessarily want to or do it on purpose, but it happens. And it moves into talking about this newfound love and what that was like.
And I think that’s what’s really important about “In Reverse” to me is that there was a sort of common denominator between this new love of my life, where we were both on equal footing. I wasn’t trying to be fixed. I wasn’t trying to fix anyone. And so the chaos was never present from that moment on. There wasn’t chaos for me to look for or to go on adventures to find. It just wasn’t there, and that is an enormous, overwhelming feeling of calm and peace. So that is what I meant by a quiet victory.
Also, it felt like love was moving backward, just as it was moving forward. Like, I met someone and knew that I loved them right away, and then I wanted to figure out why, but not in an obsessive way. “In Reverse” has a lot of different meanings. I don’t know if that answers the question or maybe a little bit.
JG: It does, for sure. Lyrically, there are a lot of moments like that on the album. Examination, looking backwards without getting stuck there. When you listen to the songs on In Reverse now, do they feel like documentation or closure or almost like a doorway into something that you’re still actively living?
Chris Garneau: Yeah, that’s a great question. I guess both. About half of the record is about parts of the older me in that negative space and the bad relationship. And then it moves into the other half of the record, being really about finding myself again, finding that presence, finding that clarity, finding that calm.
I’m still living in that place. It wasn’t that long ago. I finished the writing on this album last May, and then finished production in the fall. And it was all written in a year. My songs are always a bit like documentation, and especially the recordings are like documents to me. You remember that moment that you recorded that thing, and how it felt and what that vocal performance was like. In that sense, it’s helpful because, again, to go back to that honesty moment, these songs are generally speaking quite literal. There’s not a lot of hidden meaning.
It’s really a lot of both. But I would say that they’re helpful for me to listen to now, in that they’re proof or evidence of overcoming something and finding something new that’s really beautiful.
JG: I love that. Lastly, you know, from Music for Tourists to In Reverse, your work keeps circling intimacy, but the way you approach it has evolved. What do you think you understand about love and about yourself that you simply couldn’t have written into a record, say, ten or fifteen years ago?
Chris Garneau: That’s good. I think the intention is the first part. What I understand about myself now, as far as how I can exist in an intimate place and what my role is in a relationship, is so different from the past. In the past, a lot of my intentions were chaos, drama, melancholy and really severe, big feelings. And not that I don’t have big feelings now, but I almost wanted to only create that. Now, what I really wanted from this collection of eight songs was to definitely capture some of the severity of life and of those big moments that are challenging, but I really wanted it to move.
Like, I really wanted the feelings to move. I wanted the songs to move. And that process of production, how am I gonna make this sad, mopey song sound fun? How can I make a breakup song like “Off the Ring” not feel so weighted down and tired? And that was a big production moment. That kind of energy in production, you can also mirror that to how you start living your life.
So it wasn’t just, “I wanna produce the songs this way.” It was also like, “I wanna live my life this way.” I didn’t even have that intention or thought in my head 10 to 15 years ago, or 20 years ago. I was only concerned with the chaos, with things not being okay.
And the difference is that I want them to be okay, and I know how to do that now.
In Reverse is out today.
Follow Chris Garneau: Website, Instagram, Spotify
