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The dream of the
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“I’m sorry my love, sorry for the sound/Of your heart shattering, dead on the ground.” A sample lyric from “Home’s Still Your Bones,” a song by Jason Bajada. Loveshit emerged in mid-February, when couples are encouraged to mark their love (and make love), and singles are pressured to pick up for Valentine’s Day. Bajada spent that week reopening old wounds, revisiting the deeply autobiographical pain that inspired his new record. In the past, he drew inspiration from his musical idols, striving to craft the perfect pop song, but when his love life hit the skids, his broken heart consumed him and became his muse. “This is not me trying to be clever,” he says, “this was the result of a depression. Love kicked my ass.” Although writing about the experience provided a productive outlet, it wasn’t exactly therapeutic, and neither was playing the songs live last year. “Now I’m fine—I can perform these songs, I didn’t kill myself—but at first, it was excruciating,” Bajada explains. “It was an on and off relationship, so there were times when the songs were written and we were back together, I’d be performing a song like ‘Loveshit’ and this person was in the audience or selling the merch. “I was writing these songs to prove this person wrong, to call them on fucking up the relationship,” he adds. “Every song was like ammo, like adding another rose to the bouquet, to say, ‘No one will ever love you like I do, try to understand this.’” As the songs became more familiar to Bajada, the pain of playing them wore off, but so did the intensity. On tours with Joseph Arthur and Martha Wainwright, watching the headliners from the sidelines encouraged him to reboot his heartbreak for the sake of the show. “Martha performed ‘Bloody Motherfucking Asshole’ every night, and whether she was in front of 75 people in Joliette or 900 people in Quebec City, she nailed it, she ripped my heart to shreds.” With a new heart-hole, Bajada found ways to summon up those feelings. Getting tipsy on three glasses of wine does the trick, but at the record’s media launch, fate delivered an even better condition. “Thankfully, I was really sick last week—I looked like loveshit. I had a fever so I was sweating up there, and singing demanded so much effort, my voice was breaking. It ended up being the best show we’d ever done.” Bajada’s previous records, Puer Dolor and Up Go the Arms, drew their share of followers, as did a series of key support slots—also including Dumas, a gig that gave the singer-songwriter unprecedented access to francophone audiences. But the sonic quality of this album, which Bajada attributes in part to drummer George Donoso III (ex- Dears, currently with Black Diamond Bay) and the Troublemakers production team, as well as the earnest, universal appeal of the lyrics, elevates his oeuvre to a different class. “It’s funny that with the saddest event in my life, I ended up getting this record deal [with MapleMusic], and people are clearly connecting more with the music,” he says. “People tell me, ‘It was good before, but this is way better, this is more honest.’ So I’ll have to make sure I get really depressed again next time around.” CD LAUNCH WITH DAVID MARTEL |
