Last Friday saw the release of ‘The Heavy Steps of Dreaming’, the debut album from Vancouver-based Minor Pieces, a new songwriting partnership comprising of acclaimed singer/composer Ian William Craig and newcomer Missy Donaldson, a singer and multi-instrumentalist.
The accompanying press described it as “retaining some of the textural play and experimentation of Ian’s solo material whilst channelling it squarely within the domain of tangible songwriting, the pair utilise guitar, modified tape decks, bass and synths to fashion deeply-felt songs with their beautifully matched male / female vocals standing resolutely centre-stage. Taking influence and inspiration from the likes of Low, Grouper, Mazzy Star, Portishead, My Bloody Valentine, Talk Talk and Cat Power, ‘The Heavy Steps Of Dreaming’ sounds at once familiar whilst forging something new, unique and beyond the sum of its influences.” It concludes “‘The Heavy Steps Of Dreaming’ is an immeasurably deep, warm, grainy, honest and utterly brilliant debut album. A place you’ll want to linger in and return to.”
To guide us through the album Ian and Missy pulled together this special ‘Track by Track’ for our readers which provides a brilliant and in-depth look at the album, one that is both tender, graceful and emotionally powerful.
ROTHKO
Ian: “A song you write can be a friend that stays with you, changes as you do, layers and sheds. Most of the songs on this album are old friends, strange talismans with whom I could converse to explore whatever I was feeling at the time. Prisms that refract an experience to meditate upon or shift perspective with as they are performed. But at the risk of being a bit more literal than I should, Rothko is indeed a prism and was a place for me to come to terms with both the suicide of my cousin and the immoderate demands of grad school. As a result of both of these things, I became a bit obsessed with the work of Mark Rothko, whose eventual suicide belied a moving and profound body of work. I couldn’t reconcile his choice in this regard with his work, in the same way that I couldn’t reconcile my own artistic conceit to perfection nor the feelings that I had with regards to my cousin who happened to be similar in age and stage to me. It terrified me that perhaps questing after a relationship to the sublime necessarily ended in these destructive spaces. I don’t think so anymore, but I think there is a danger to perfectionism or any system whose sole function is to expand to where it is not, and that it is art’s purpose to be a signpost and not the thing itself. We can have a sort of agency within this conversation. So Rothko’s work is simply a place where we can feel what we do in front of them, no different a signpost than those profound events that shape us or old songs we write.”
THIS HOUSE
Ian: “My best friend is a huge fan of noun songs. His is a plainer style, and I am constantly humbled by his ability to put observations neatly and well-arranged under decent lighting, like a profound chest of drawers next to an easy chair so you have a comfortable place to sit and go through it all. What is there is there for him, and so nouns are his friend. This is this; what more do you need? That this is just this is poetry as we need it and is enough. We had a discussion about what our mental spaces looked like, and I was shocked at the fact that he could picture something. To have anything at all there boggles my nebulous adjectival mind. I believe he started to describe the nature of a chair that he saw there, and it inspired me to try to envision my own memories and experience of the world as a kind of thing to be wandered through and looked at and described. Still very fragmented indeed, but this song is the best I could come up with: bits and pieces of memories that I cracked the door open on to peer into for a moment, stitched together in a great shifting house. It’s my best crack at a noun song.”
BRÁVALLAGATA
Ian: “I don’t generally like songs about romance. I don’t generally like songs about going to clubs either. Except here is a song with both. I found myself alone in Iceland in the middle of some thick emotional spaces over Christmas one year. The set of circumstances culminating in the trip were of the typical soap-opera variety, unrequited this and that mixed with heartbreak and change. Human stuff. Iceland is a most incredible place though, especially at that time of year when it is more or less perpetually in the dark. The sky mumbles directly from sunrise to sunset over the course of a couple of hours with nothing resembling afternoon daylight between them. I’m from the northern prairies of Canada, and so I am used to this a little, but this darkness, my goodness, it was a tangible compelling thing. The country didn’t seem at all perturbed by it, and in fact, people revelled in unmooring themselves from the rhythm of the sky and its scheduled time. Dancing occurred heavily and often, bars were open at will. It was a perfect place for heartbreak and healing. The flat I stayed in had a guitar, and this song was written there over a sunless stretch of very fulfilling confusion.”
GRACE
Missy: “I had just parted with my dear Grandmother, Grace, at her Hospice bedside, and was sitting aimlessly in an old haunt parking lot when the song came to me. I had gone through the motions of saying my final goodbye, though it hadn’t really sunk in at all of course – the velocity of her actually being ‘gone.’ I returned to the hospice to sit with her shortly after she passed, and remember arriving to see that a candle had been lit with her name in her honour like they do for each passing. Reality began to set in. Watching her lie completely still evoked a sense of vertigo: to be so near pure stillness while everything else around me was moving. Processing its permanence and the void that it left was bewildering. It all happened quite quickly. The song originated on piano and I slowly added another verse in a later stage of grieving. When Ian and I approached it together, we felt the need to highlight the sacredness and layers of grief in some way. He added a hauntingly beautiful a cappella choral harmony loop as a foundation, followed by layers of vocal echoes that we recorded on tape machines, finally supported with the warm tones of a Prophet ‘08. We built it up and took away just enough to leave space for the necessary vulnerability that comes with the realization of losing Grace.”
THE WAY WE ARE IN SONG
Ian: “Tension seems to be a theme on this record. I like me a good paradox. What greater dissonance is there in our lives between how we are and how we think we are? The inner world and the outer one can probably never really be reconciled. And yet we spend a great deal of our energy worrying about using one to control the other. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with this, but I have observed in my life that we are not that good at predicting the future in general, and we are also not that good at using these predictions to have a relationship with ourselves, even though we tend to rely upon this set of fantasies for our sense of self-worth. Not much ever goes as planned though, and I think it’s important to admit that there is always going to be a difference between how you are and how you think you are. Beckett says: fail, then fail better. I think that makes more sense to me than trying to expect one’s way into happiness.”
BURDEN
Ian: “Out of all the songs on this record, I think this one has changed the most. This might sound ironic from someone whose work is so thickly layered and textured, but I firmly believe that one should say a thing as plainly as possible without ornamentation. There’s a passage by Adorno which states that everything should be reduced to only that which is communicating which has always resonated with me. Burden used to be full of choruses and bridges and passages that lead you through serpentine corridors of what mostly amounted to spectacle, but it all eroded away over time since the song is simply things that I needed to hear when I was sad one time. All of that raiment loosened and disbanded over the years, the arrangement falling to just guitar and voice, and now all that’s left is simply a small clearing in case someone else needs to be sad there too.”
TENDER FIRE
Ian: “One of my favourite poems by Rumi the Sufi talks about a man whose life work is writing. In the poem, he takes his collective work to a guru he has solicited for advice on how his words could better capture the sense of sublime that he has sought through writing. The guru takes his life’s work and casts it all into a fountain. I realize as I write this that I have confused the story; at some point in my head the fountain became a fire upon which his work was thrown, but the point is that the guru held the man’s work up to a divine sort of annihilating crucible, unburdening him and tempering his words at the same time. The writer was devastated at first, but then felt a divine lightness once he had grieved, for he saw the extent to which he had falsely become his own writing. I thought it was a very beautiful notion, and since then I have attempted to hold things I find dear to me up to this same sublime force. It is extremely difficult, as I too have tended to define myself by the things that I make, and therefore hold them far too affectedly, forgetting what they were intended to do in the first place. The tender fire in this song is a kind of repeating mantra for me, a reminder to embrace the fires that the things we love light inside us in order that we might be vulnerable, and to not be precious with things that are transforming, as all things always are.”
SHIPBREAKING
Ian: “The beast of the set. In contrast to Burden, whose vessel only needed to be short and sparse in which to sail out properly, in all of its many previous iterations Shipbreaking could never be anything other than a great beast since it’s kind of one of those theory of everything songs. I was inspired by the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky who captures images of landscapes transformed by industry, and let me tell you: they are gorgeous. This gorgeousness belies the terrible nature of the destruction this industry has ravaged upon the landscape in which it finds itself, but what is really amazing about these images is that the tension between those two opposites is allowed to linger. He never exalts or promotes these spaces, nor preaches anything at the viewer; they are indeed still terrible, but they are also stunning, and some kind of strange malfunction occurs in the viewer as a result. One particular set of images haunted me, being a series taken of shipbreakers working in Bangladesh. All kinds of tension: great vessels we in the west sailed all the excesses and fuel and fortune and dreams of our society all washed up on a beach, being slowly mined for parts in terrible conditions by people who dreamed themselves of a better life and thought this would get them there. The hidden costs of our aspirations turned ugly because we focussed so much on the things themselves and not what was underneath them. I felt in front of those photos as though I was a shipbreaker of sorts, undoing the threads of things I held dear by holding onto them too tightly. Once we know the costs of things, what do we do with that information? Do we ignore it and continue on? How can we change something which is so entrenched in our culture? I don’t have the answers to these things, but I do have a ten minute set of theories and feelings on the subject to close the record out with.”
The Heavy Steps Of Dreaming is out now on FatCat Records.