City and Colour Grapples with Grief in ‘The Love Still Held Me Near’

It begins softly and subtly, flooding the emptiness with a silvery chill. Even before the words begin, the song says so much with stirring acoustics that sigh and ache, sounding so human. City and Colour’s Dallas Green knew the beginning would be the hardest place to start, so he saved it for last.

The first track of his latest album, “Meant To Be,” opens with an exhale of mournful strings, unraveling something that had been coiled inside for a while. “I went in to sit down and track,” Green says of recording the acoustic guitar for the song. “I started playing and I just started crying immediately and I just cried for the whole take.”

[RELATED: City and Colour Tackles Grief in New Song “Meant to Be”]

That was the take used. That’s what can be heard in the opening song, preparing listeners for The Love Still Held Me Near. “That’s part of the process,” he tells American Songwriter. “That’s part of the healing of it is sort of letting it out.”

“Meant To Be” was a song born from unthinkable loss and grapples with grief as does the rest of City and Colour’s seventh studio release. A portrait of heartache and healing across 12 tracks, The Love Still Held Me Near finds the folk artist confronting pain head-on. For Green, the only way out was through.

Prior to the creation of what would be The Love Still Held Me Near, Green was in what he describes as a “zombie-like state.” He was adrift in the fog of an unimaginably difficult season, having lost two people very dear to him in a short amount of time – one being his longtime friend and producer Karl Bareham, who drowned while the band was touring Australia in 2019. The second is his cousin. Then the pandemic hit, leaving the artist with nothing but his thoughts, so he turned to music to work through what he was now forced to face.

“I didn’t really feel like I was in the right place,” he says of that time. “Somewhere along that year of 2020, I started to kind of do some self-inventory and have good conversations with friends, and things just kind of started to open up.

“I really started to find myself again as far as I love making music,” he continues. “I love creating. I love writing myself out of whatever I’m going through, so I really just leaned into the process of making the music as an escape for myself.”

The Love Still Held Me Near is by no means Green’s first foray into his emotional depths. Throughout his 20-year career, he’s always crafted songs openly and vulnerably, laying bare his soul in order to write his way through difficult times. But now, he was experiencing life at an extreme.

“The one difference with this record is that I had never been more obliterated by what life was throwing at me than I was coming out of that period,” he says, adding that this album became the map to his healing. “It was like at one moment, I realized I had a way out of what I was dealing with.”

He found solace in the words—so biting and bruised, but hopeful in spite of everything. He sought remedy in the sounds—sweeping, throat-tightening compositions equally as raw and explosive as what he was feeling inside. Most importantly, he found a kinship in the process.

Green was supported through the album’s recording by his co-producer, engineers, and bandmates, many of whom were living the same reality after losing their friend and colleague. He warred with the pain during the process, but he wasn’t alone. “I was going to war with a bunch of great teammates who never made me feel like I was being too vulnerable or never made me feel like I couldn’t do it,” he says. “It almost became more of like a joyful and rejoicing experience than it was an exhausting, emotional process.”

The result was a way through the sorrow and to the other side of grief. “I have found a good place with my grief and everything that had gone on before,” he says. As the album’s closing track suggests, Green has found a way to “Begin Again.”

City and Colour’s The Love Still Held Me Near is out now.

Photo Courtesy of All Eyes Media