Colin Stetson on his musical mythology and love of Montreal’s bang-for-the-buck

Colin Stetson doesn’t shy away from musical world-building, and that continues with his newest album.

The Michigan-bred/Montreal-based composer, saxophonist, multireedist and overall multi-hyphenate returns with The love it took to leave you, his sixth studio LP and first since 2017’s All This I Do for Glory.

Due out on Sept. 13 via Envision Records, the album was recorded back in January, and Stetson mixed it himself throughout the year. Its title track is also its lead single, and the album is a prequel “in a narrative sense” to his previous releases, as Stetson puts it.

“They’re kind of like mythology that is told as an aside, as a tangent or an expositional in the midst of the trilogy narrative,” he continues.

“I liked the idea of focusing on that, approaching that storyline as a musical narrative. Then the idea came of, ‘Okay, if I’m going to explore this as a foundational myth to this other story, how can I also make the real life of it reflect that a little bit, functionally speaking?’”

Given the seven-year gap between albums, this has obviously been a long time coming for Stetson, who says this album has been in the works since around the time of its predecessor, and meant to serve as its second half. The writing process of the album’s three main tentpole tracks began back in 2017, developing in the years that followed as he worked on other tracks. 2017 was also the year Stetson started working on the score for the instant-classic A24 horror film Hereditary.

“I think I had a day off between wrapping on the score to Hereditary, sending all the stems off, to starting work on a TV show called The First that I had been contracted to do with Hulu,” says Stetson. Those score commitments, coupled with touring and the pandemic, contributed to the album’s delay.

“More personal reasons led to me working on another record in the interim, When we were that what wept for the sea, which came out last year. After wrapping on that, I was finally able to put my mind back into the framework of getting this one recorded in the way I had always wanted and meant for it to be recorded.”

One interpretation of the album’s title could be having to make tough decisions in life to hurt others, even if done so from a place of love. Looking at the title track’s YouTube video and seeing the top comment as “Chills through my whole body. This song is significant to my life right now. I had to leave my profoundly mentally ill wife of 22 years. Bitter bittersweet,” is proof of how evocative a title like that can be.

Such a comment and interpretation is a reminder of how there’s a “beautiful clumsiness” to language, but Stetson says the title The love it took to leave you has multiple meanings to him. Nonetheless, he’s “routinely quite thrilled” by how others have reacted to it.

“(The meaning) could be — maybe like this person you quoted from YouTube — finding a deeper or more confident love in oneself in order to recognize that you’re doing no one, not yourself nor anyone else, any benefit by staying,” he explains.

“It could be an external love: a love for another person, an environment, a place, another thing. A love for some sort of concept or endeavour. It could be something that creates enough of a swell and a lift in order to take you out of something else. (It could mean) the sense of oneself in the first place, and the love being a deep, unwavering affection for a moment in time, so as to exit a sense of self and the ego.”

However one may interpret the meaning of its title, self-love and solitude are among the album’s biggest themes (“Solitude is something that weaves its way through pretty much anything I’ve ever written,” says Stetson, chuckling).

Over the course of a week in early 2023, the album was recorded at Montreal’s converted art complex the Darling Foundry. Stetson and co still made it in a room composed of steel, brick and concrete.

There had initially been talks to record the album in Berlin, plans that went awry when COVID happened. Deciding it would ultimately make more sense if they laid the recordings down in Montreal, Stetson visited multiple local spaces before ultimately landing on the Darling Foundry.

“Having spent so much of my time aurally in these spaces playing music, I tend to have pretty strong reactions to being inside a space really quickly, in terms of how I feel about the reflections and resonance,” he continues.

“Darling has multiple venues — there are multiple halls in it to use, which we really did. For the recording, each one of them has this beautiful warmth. There’s no concrete-y, sharp, staggering reflections. It shows in what we were able to get… what the microphones can capture, how the instruments can project.”

Stetson had wanted to do a record in this style for a while, something he’d been talking about with his longtime sound engineer, Jonas Verwijnen. Using a space with excellent acoustics that could handle a P.A. system similar to that of a live show was always the goal, so he could be amplified like he would in a live setting, rather than the closely mic’d setup of a smaller room.

It was an ambitious production approach, perhaps — one that involved playing for eight hours a day, with the whole setup rigged for projections, lights and video. But Stetson says the experience was a fun and rewarding one, even if taxing.

“Here, we have all of those close mics picking up the really intimate sounds of the instrument, of my throat and of my breath,” he says. “All those microphones are being projected through a giant P.A. in the main hall. My voice was being amplified only in the secondary hall, which has its own three or four-second decay reverb. Percussion off of the keys was being amplified into another room.

“We were able to, in a very isolated way, pick up all of these sounds not only from their close proximity, but also in the context of these giant rooms. It gave a lot of different colours to work with in the mix for me, and yet, all of the music was played exactly how I play everything on a solo record (and) a solo concert — all in one take, all at the same time.”

Stetson will be performing in Montreal on Tuesday at New City Gas as part of this year’s edition of MUTEK, delivering a show the festival describes as “a profound immersion into his singular sonic world, shaped by influences ranging from hardcore punk to classical symphonies.” He’ll be spending much of this fall in general on the road, with several American shows already planned in September.

Having lived in Montreal since late 2007 after moving from New York, Stetson says the manner of his living here is one that’s “constantly evolving.” But from then until about 2015, he was on the road, so he spent the next few years truly discovering the city. (“I still do feel like that, because I don’t live here full time,” he says.)

So what’s kept him here despite his time spent so frequently on tour? Part of it is thanks to him living part-time in Vermont for the past decade, and both the city’s proximity to his other home and Stetson’s personal history with Montreal are big factors. “I have friends here that I’ve had for very many years — that first and foremost,” he adds.

“The mountain. The parks here are something to be cherished. In Montreal, you get an enormous amount of bang for the buck. I don’t mean that monetarily. You get so much art, music, culture, food, access to all of that, but in a very small package. It’s not a giant, sprawling city, and yet there is an enormous amount to be gleaned from it.” ■

Colin Stetson performs at New City Gas, on a MUTEK bill with Patrick Watson and Kara-Lis Coverdale, on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 9 p.m., For more on Colin Stetson, please visit his website.

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