Murray A. Lightburn
By Peter Nomeland
Murray A. Lightburn is a Canadian musician, best known for his work as frontman of the Montreal chamber rock band The Dears, alongside his wife Natalia Yanchak. His newest project “Once Upon a Time in Montreal,” is a solo record described as “an audio version of a biopic” of his late father. Murray sat down with the Wake to talk about the digital takeover of music, being an English-speaking band in French Montreal, and what happened when the often described “Black Morrisey,” due to their similar voices, met the man himself.
What are some of the biggest changesyou’ve seen in the music industry since you started?
It’s all related to technology. You can go back to Michelangelo’s painting the Sistine Chapel, and now people years in the future are taking pictures of it and posting them on Instagram. I mean, that’s insane, you know? So really, it boils down to technology. When I was first making and writing music and making recordings, it was all on cassettes or four-track tapes. And then the first recordings we did as a band were on eight-track tape reel-to-reel kind of thing and was the only technology. Then, slowly, digital technology started to creep into our world, and our full digital album was our second album. But even then, we didn’t know what that meant. And right around then, things like Napster were happening, and MP3s were making a way forward, which launched forward where we are today.
What was coming up in the music scene in Canada, particularly in French-speaking Montreal like?
I think it’s important to acknowledge the French culture here, and you can’t escape it. But it definitely informs a lot about living here and being a band here. Coming up in the scene in Montreal, your opportunities are pretty bottlenecked as an anglophone English singing band. You have to immediately go national, whereas if you’re a French band in Montreal, you can have a full career and a top-selling album in the country by selling records in Quebec. We didn’t start re-selling records in Canada until Rolling Stone and Enemy Magazine started talking about us. And then people in Canada would pick up international magazines and see this band, the Dears, and say, oh, they’re Canadian, I better go out and buy this record. I better start playing this album. And that’s what happens in Canada: you must get approval elsewhere. A perfect example was like, you know, we were making splashes here and there because we were this weird Montreal band, but then the first time we played David Letterman, all of a sudden, all the newspapers in Canada wanted to talk to us about playing the David Letterman show. And it’s just like how this is, what is this Shelbyville? This is the most small-town thing I’ve ever heard. So now you want to talk to us, but only about playing network TV in America. You don’t want to talk about our music? That’s hilarious to me, but that is quintessential Canada and quintessential Quebec.
What made you want to make this project?
For this album in particular, I was grappling with my old man’s passing, which was a life- altering event as an adult man in his mid-fi fties with two children with quite a few things in the rearview mirror already. So this was a new frontier for me—something I’d never had to grapple with. I didn’t know how I was going to deal with it. So then, once the dust had settled, and it was just me alone in my studio and my instruments, I just started to write what was happening in the things that I wanted to, I guess, get o my chest as, almost as if I was on the couch, you know, with. It shaped itself into a conversation I wish we had with my old man. You know, because he kept his cards pretty close to his chest, as that generation of men did.
What’s the difference between doing a solo project and a project with The Dears?
The Dears have been around for so long that I don’t even feel like it’s my band anymore. Honestly, it feels like I’m just punching my card when it’s time to work on that project. And that project is very much its own thing. It’s like a conscious AI being at this point, like what goes into making those records and writing those songs is a completely different animal from what I do on a personal level. And these records that I make under my own name are much more personal and much more selfish in a way. Sonically, it’s what I want to hear; it’s what I want to sing; it’s what I want to perform, whereas thematically, with The Dears, it’s more about collective ideas and collective consciousness type of subject matter and how we relate to each other in the world, whereas the stuff that I’m doing is really personal stories.
You’ve been dubbed “the black Morrissey” due to your similar-sounding voice. Do you have any stories about him?
The only time I ever met him, I wore my sunglasses the entire time and told his manager that I never took o my sunglasses. And what he did not know was that underneath my sunglasses, and by the time we finished the meeting, I had little tears coming out of my eyes that just, and I was, the glasses were like this big. So by the time they got down to the edge of the sunglasses, he never saw them come out from underneath (laughs).