angry Dallas Green, but that’s not the case. I like playing quiet and loud. And I think this record shows that. There’s songs that are just me and a guitar and there’s songs that are me and a band. I’ve reached the point where I don’t care what people say or what they want a City & Colour song to be. It represents me breaking through that and C & C is no longer just a solo project; it is the main focus and I think this record represents that.” Of course, it’s easy to pigeonhole without thought. Little Hell represents Dallas’ willingness to turn City & Colour into a project that doesn’t so much defy expectations but rather is his only musical outlet and therefore will be prone to all sorts of divergences.
“City & Colour is no longer just a solo project; it is my main focus and I think this record represents that!”
“I’m no stranger to drums, bass and electric guitars, so there’s songs on the
record that I think are unexpected. A song like Fragile Bird - which has a fuzzy bassline and a rocking groove – is unexpected for a C & C fan I think, but for me it wasn’t. I like that sort of stuff and I had an idea for that song that I didn’t want to change just because I was worried about people being thrown for a loop.” Fan reactions to material they might not be entirely comfortable with are
rarely a big deal to most musicians - take Metallica and Lou Reed’s current collaboration as an example of that - but it’s comforting for Dallas to know that his fan-base trusts him and that he, in return, can trust them to follow him for the ride. “Those are the fans that I like, the ones that are willing to grow with me.
You’ll always have people who are only with you for one record and then they move on and that’s fine. I think everybody’s like that. But there are fans that are there for life, to grow with you and experiment with you. Like you
paring his energies down to focus on one project is a good thing. “There’s definitely a little bit of a relief,” he says. “I wanted to see what I could get out of C & C and see what the end result would be having given it that much more time.”
Insisting that it was no problem switching from the heavier stylings of his
previous work to the quieter strains of C & C, Dallas explains that he hasn’t actually fully jettisoned the rockier side of things entirely.
“People are interested in me for the right reasons, not because it’s the hip cool thing to do...”
“There was a fan-base already in place for City & Colour. There wasn’t that fright that I would leave a band and try to go off and do music and hope that people would listen to it. They were already listening. That suppressed all the worry,” he says. “C & C was birthed out of fans of Alexisonfire who had heard that I had these other songs. So there’s definitely been a crossover (of fans) but I think in the last two years, it’s grown into its own thing and there are definitely people who come to the shows who have never listened to Alexisonfire, or have heard of it but it’s just not their thing.” The contrast between the two bands is, of course, vast. But then, what would be the point in Dallas Green deciding to follow his own path if it just imitated what he was already doing? The first City & Colour album, Sometimes, was released in 2005 comprised of old songs that were brought up to date. The second album, Bring Me Your Love, would be released three years later with a full-band sound and a wider variety of instruments. This year’s effort, Little Hell, emphasises the bigger side of Dallas’ song writing, utilising layers of electric guitars as well as ballads subtly drawn with acoustic instruments. “It’s my most realised album and it might seem that for seven years, I’ve been trying to split myself between quiet, soft-singing Dallas Green, and loud,
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