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▀█████▓▌ MTD Proudly Presents ▐▓█████▀
[Info]
Artist : David Usher
Album : Songs From The Last Day On Earth
Label : Maple Music Recordings
Genre : Rock
Street Date : 2012-10-02
Quality : 259 kbps / 44.1kHz / Joint Stereo
Encoder : Lame 3.98.4 -V0
Size : 95.55 MB
Time : 48:58 min
Url : http://davidusher.com/
[Tracks]
1. See The Stars 4:01
2. Rice Paper 4:17
3. Winterstorm 3:51
4. City Of Light 5:17
5. Lonely People 4:10
6. Operator 4:29
7. Stay 2:55
8. Bitter Pill 3:39
9. Burning Bridges 3:23
10. All These Simple Things 4:04
11. Partir Ailleurs 4:17
12. RΘpondez-Moi 4:35
[Notes]
He may have had a French-language hit last year with the song "Je Repars"
and live in Montreal with his family, but that does not mean that David
Usher is comfortable yet singing in Quebec's native tongue.
"It's a very different experience in that when I sing in English I often
improv because I often forget words and I move into improv, and that's
fine," he says. "But in French I can't do that; I can't improv in French. So
that's the biggest stressor: you don't have the freedom to improv. You have
to focus a little bit more. But at the same time there is something about
the language that I love singing it. It's a big challenge to sing, but I do
love it."
Perhaps you should take language lessons from your kids, I suggest. (Usher
and his wife have two young daughters.)
He smirks. "They think my accent is funny!"
David Usher is here on the second floor of Toronto's Rivoli club doing
interviews to push the imminent release of Songs from the Last Day on Earth.
Written and recorded over the course of a year and a half ("I think that
every record is going to be about five minutes... but it always seems to
take a long time"), his eighth solo album since the end of his band Moist in
2000, as one might infer from the title, is something of a concept record.
Inspired by the song "See the Stars," one of the first written for the new
record, it is centred on the idea of Usher and his friends "imagining and
visualizing what that end would be in that last moment."
To that end the songs unfold in "a series of flashbacks, like the flood of
memory that would come back to you of all the important moments and all the
joyful, painful, incredible moments that would come rushing back at the very
end. And if you could distil those into something you could take with you
within your life, you might live your life much differently."
The album reunites Usher with longtime collaborator and co-producer Jonathan
Gallivan (The Crystal Method, My Brilliant Beast) who also helmed his last
record, 2010's The Mile End Sessions. Recording began at Usher's place
before moving to Montreal's Planet Studios. The singer also travelled to
Toronto a few times to work with the Toronto-based Gallivan.
"We're very portable now, we're very computer literate, and we know how to
make it all work out."
While most of the new songs began acoustically, Usher says the challenge of
recording Songs from the Last Day on Earth was to hold onto that acoustic
base "without having an acoustic record. So trying to make instruments come
together, rhythms come together with the intention of an acoustic album but
without it actually being acoustic. There are acoustic elements to it, but
it's grander in places. It has more breadth, but I still wanted to maintain
the sentiment of intimacy."
While Usher is still very much engaged in music and is 100% committed to his
solo career, the former Moist frontman has also branched out into the tech
industry. He is involved with the creation of the Amnesty International
microsite Artists for Amnesty (http://artistsforamnesty.com/) where fans can
download free music from the likes of Sarah Slean, Grimes and (soon) Arcade
Fire in return for signing up to receive an Amnesty International
newsletter. Usher is also a speaker on the "powers of creativity" according
to his business website CloudID.com. I ask how the role and importance of
music in his life has changed since he was first crisscrossing Canada in a
van with his bandmates in Moist two decades ago.
"It's definitely different," Usher acknowledges. "I love making music, but I
have come to realize that what I really love is making things. So I will
continue to write songs because I am always every day in search of a perfect
song, which is impossible, but I am still in search of it. But I am much
more concerned with making things. If I was to define what my job is I sort
of define it as thinking about ideas. That's what I am trying to do is
thinking about things and making things happen."
Given everything Usher, 46, has made happen since Moist released their debut
album Silver back in 1994, his sense of what he can accomplish creatively
has understandably evolved over the years.
"I feel like a different person, for sure, because it's been twenty years,"
he says. "I feel like a different human. I mean I am still friends with
those guys and I am still proud of the music we played together for sure and
I still play some of those songs at shows, but the idea of the artist is to
evolve and be different and to try different things and to be focused on the
things you are making now."