I could never recall whether it is good things or bad things that occur in threes. Some light research tells me that both are espoused in relatively equal measure…so let’s start over.

Cognitive biases occur in threes. Something happens twice, that’s a coincidence. The third time, your reality starts to bend away from whatever thread of objectivity you were anchored to; an attempt to explain what the hell may be going on and/or going wrong. A glitch in the matrix, if you will. Or perhaps just a useful container in which to build a concept.

Before I decided to use the number three as a Conscious Creative Constraint in the writing and production of False Balance, I was encountering it everywhere.

I started writing the first new song that shaped the story of this album, “We Can’t Both Be Actors”, in October 2023. The antepenultimate (third to last) month of the year, three weeks before my 30th birthday. It is a story expressed in three movements, or what I have been calling a micro-medley. The skeleton of a concept emerged from this trilogy: descent, dissent, dissonant. As I finished up writing and sequencing the record (a process that tends to happen simultaneously for me), I remarked that 7 out of 10 songs were micro-medleys. You can do the math on how many follow a more traditional verse-chorus structure.

I opened up the wound to practice sewing it anew

In a nod to one of the most renowned concept albums of all time, textile artists sometimes refer to back side of their works (where all the thread ends and messy secrets of the composition are exposed) as “The Dark Side of the Loom”.

I took up tapestry weaving three years ago, through a course taught by the wonderful Jessica Brouder. Weaving is an art form that I find beautifully analogous to my personal approach to making an album. The sequence of progressions and lyrics are the warp threads while the production elements, the sounds and the people making them, are the weft. The loom is its own kind of elevator, containing and transporting a work-in-progress to its ultimate destination.

When I sat down with Shae to pitch my elevator concept, I introduced the idea of organizing the personnel as a facet of the storytelling: band members entering and exiting the elevator over the course of the sequence. We had just watched our friends Bellbird play a set the Montreal International Jazz Festival and I was imagining a dream scenario where different bands compromised of my favourite musicians play in a cohesive sequence. The magic number of ensembles, it turns out, was three.

I grew up in a three-candles-on-the-birthday-cake-regardless-of-age household, with a candle to represent each of past, present and future. What was, what is, and a wish for what could be.

May what’s happened before us not determine what we can become

What began as an exercise in wish fulfillment became a densely woven antifascist rock opera. Released in my 33rd year, False Balance is my first collection of songs entirely reflective of and reacting to the present moment. It took me a long time to come around to releasing music under my own name, and as such the first two ST albums involved the daunting task of summarizing ~28 years worth of earthly experiences.

This third outing unlocked new modalities. It feels like a big leap, but one I was eager to take. I am proud of what we were able to capture. Each studio session with my friends, these extraordinary artists, was a gift.

I find my worth outside the cycles of outdated paradigms

Weaving has taught me a kind of proactive patience that I am attempting to apply across my creative practice, one where you don’t necessarily have it all mapped out before you start committing the threads of your ideas to the media landscape loom.

I would like to keep playing inside the world of this album for a while and see what emerges, detached from traditional album cycle formulas and timelines (which these days are, for the most part and especially for independent artists, arbitrary).

Thank you for joining me this far, I hope you’ll stick around for whatever’s next. To celebrate the album’s third week out in the world, I have included a pair of lists below for a peek into what I was reading and thinking about while writing and producing the album.

I’ll see you on the dark side of the loom

- shel

What I was reading while writing False Balance:

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension - Hanif Abdurraqib

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States - Daniel Immerwahr

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World - Naomi Klein

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches - Audre Lorde

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet - Taylor Lorenz

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity - José Esteban Muñoz

How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them - Jason Stanley

The Knowing - Tanya Talaga

Falling Back in Love With Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls - Kai Cheng Thom

My desert island third albums:

Homogenic - Björk (1997)

The Man Who Sold the World - David Bowie (1970)

The Reminder - Feist (2007)

Jubilee - Japanese Breakfast (2021)

Bury Me At Makeout Creek - Mitski (2014)

The Fragile - Nine Inch Nails (1999)

To Bring You My Love - PJ Harvey (1995)

Songs for the Deaf - Queens of the Stone Age (2002)

Strange Mercy - St. Vincent (2011)

The Turning Wheel - SPELLLING (2021)

RULES OF THREE

03.26 mix