Acclaimed singer, songwriter and performer City and Colour (Dallas Green) is out on tour in support of his recent album The Love Still Held Me Near, with an upcoming performance in Denver at Summit Music Hall on August 29th. With seven full-length albums now under his belt, the night promises to be filled with old fan-favorites and newer sing-alongs that’ll leave your heart full before it comes to an end. Tickets can be found HERE.
Hailing from St. Catharines, Ontario, Green started City and Colour in 2005 as a (then) quiet counter to the band he co-founded, hardcore luminaries Alexisonfire, releasing songs via the Internet. They proved so popular with fans that he released City and Colour’s first album, Sometimes, later that year which won the JUNO Award for Alternative Album of the Year. He has since released five more albums under the moniker, accompanied by a shifting lineup of musicians, and collected four JUNO awards, including two Songwriter of the Year awards, plus one Triple Platinum, two Double Platinum, six Platinum, and one Gold certification in Canada, and one Gold certification in Australia. In 2022, Green was honored with the SOCAN National Achievement Award in recognition of his philanthropic contributions to music education in Canada.
Beyond the legacy of City and Colour, Green teamed up with global icon Alecia Moore (a.k.a. P!nk) to form the folk duo You+Me. The duo’s acclaimed Platinum-certified first record, rose ave., debuted at #4 on the U.S. Top 200 Chart, #1 in Canada, #2 in Australia.
His latest release, The Love Still Held Me Near is arguably the most sonically aggressive and stylistically expansive outing in the City and Colour canon, comes from what Green has acknowledged as the most difficult time in his life. Within the span of a year, he lost two crucial figures – his cousin Nicholas Osczcypko, with whom he played in his first band, and longtime friend, City and Colour producer and engineer Karl Bareham, whose drowning death in Australia while on tour was the direct impetus for The Love Still Held Me Near’s first single, “Meant to Be.” At the time, Green was also separated from his wife of (then) 11 years and felt their marriage was “seemingly over.”
Green feels those inspirations were vehicles to push The Love Still Held Me Near in its own direction of exploration and discovery.
“It’s not specifically about those events,” he says of the album, which was co-produced with longtime band member and multi-instrumentalist Matt Kelly. “It’s just an overarching theme of loss and the idea of trying to get through it.” Though he adds with a small chuckle that “it was like I was having this beautiful, perfect mid-life crisis,” the deeper purpose of the album is “asking good questions about life and then framing it in a way that anyone can find themselves in it. I know the experience I’m writing about on this album is not singular at all; it’s everything we have to deal with as human beings, trying to live and get through it.”
“It was all about the love of things,” Green explains. “I had gone through the most negative, terrible aspect of living, and it was the idea that the positive and the love could still keep me, us and my friends together. I like to write. It’s what I do when I just need to get something off my chest. It makes me feel better.”