City And Colour: Born This Way

"What do you think you're good at, Dallas?"

The singer quickly looks away, fidgeting. His hands — the ones tattooed with "True" and "Love" across the knuckles — pick at invisible dust on his crisp, black pants. His feet tap nervously, emitting the distinct sound of new shoes.

"These are really squeaky," he says.

Then, after a long pause: "I don't know. Not much."

Dallas Green is clearly good at a lot of things. He's good at writing songs and singing for both a hardcore band (Alexisonfire) and as an acoustic solo act, which since 2005 he has called City And Colour. He's good at working constantly without a break, with both acts keeping him in the studio or on stage pretty solidly year round. He's good at playing quiet music to huge audiences. (Earlier this year, he performed a sold out show at London, England's prestigious Royal Albert Hall.)

Yet the 30-year-old singer/songwriter is not particularly good at accepting that these things have made him a music star.

In the downtown Toronto office of his label Dine Alone Records, Green is at the end of a full day of back-to-back interviews for his new record, Little Hell. He's still alert and enthusiastic when talking about his music, delving frankly into the personal situations that inspired this latest material.

But he doesn't know what to say when questions turn to himself, to his talents and his popularity.

"It's not who I am," he explains.

"A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a Lady Gaga interview and she was saying she thinks of herself as one of the best singers in the business, one of the best songwriters in the business. She kept saying things like that. And I kept thinking, 'What an asshole.'"

Green is not trying to be a jerk. He's just a straight-talker; a quality — along with his bearded-punk rock-boy-next-door looks and aw-shucks personality — that has done much to endear him to the legion of teenage girls and young ladies that make up the bulk of his audience. It's the same quality that allows him to reveal his innermost anxieties in song, and Little Hell is rife with glimpses into the things that — quite literally — keep him up at night.

"Fragile Bird," Little Hell's first single, speaks directly of the night terrors suffered by Green's wife. The story seems particularly bold in the telling, since most of his fans know who she is: well-known television personality Leah Miller.

"Some of the most scary moments of my life are laying beside her — which is weird to say about your wife," Green explains. "When I'm asleep and she has them and I wake up to that.

"You know if your alarm goes off and you're dreaming and it seeps into your dream and you wake up and you're kind of weirded out? Imagine that, but having someone screaming bloody murder beside you. It's really traumatizing."

Trauma and tragedy are themes of Little Hell, though Green says the overall message is one of finding ways to overcome these so-called little hells that keep us from enjoying life to the fullest.

For him, the way out is definitely through making music. He wrote "O Sister" to reach out to his sister when she was having troubles and he was away on the road, in the end helping himself out just as much.

"It does help me because I know she loves it, and I love singing it; it reminds me of her," he says. "And people come up to me on tour and tell me it means a lot to them because they've been through something with their sister or their mom or their relatives.

"So, yeah, I guess it's therapy for me."

To some extent, it's the nature of writing anything in the post-LiveJournal world that sharing your pain with others has become virtuous, and for young rock music songwriters especially, storytelling or politicking has given way to collective catharsis. (It's not called "emo" for nothing, after all.)

But for all the satisfaction Green receives from knowing his work is helping his fans deal with their problems, he reveals this realization can at times be difficult to bear.

Recently, he was forwarded an email from a mother who had her daughter's tombstone engraved with "sleeping sickness," the title of a song from City And Colour's 2008 Bring Me Your Love album.

"I guess a few years back, her husband passed away, and her daughter played her 'Sleeping Sickness' and that was the song that helped them get through it," says Green.

"Then just recently, that daughter was killed in a hit-and-run. And the mother and her other daughter sat and listened to that song over and over.

"It's so heavy, to know that. As much as it should make me feel good, it makes me feel horrible. I wish people didn't have to go through stuff like that.

"I'm really happy that the music I make helps people, but... I don't want to say it's pressure, but it kind of is.

"When someone says that to you, that a song I wrote helped them get through two deaths in the family and they wrote it on someone's gravestone, now I gotta think about that the next time I write. Is the next song going to be able to do that? Should I care if it does? ... It's like the more emotionally draining version of a record company going, 'We need another hit.'"

Considering Green records for the closely-knit indie Dine Alone Records — where he's been doing just fine bringing the label radio hits and video spins, thank you very much — it's likely the only person breathing down his back to write a hit is Green himself.

Despite being his own harshest critic, Green was not afraid to chart some new territory on Little Hell, expanding his simple guy-with-guitar format to include more electric instruments and upbeat rock rhythms.

"Fragile Bird" presents a more immediately poppier side of City And Colour than ever, and while it's far from the heavy raucous of Alexisonfire, it ruffled a few feathers of long-time fans, who posted negative comments about preferring the more stripped-down sound. (These critics were clearly in the minority, though; when the album went up for pre-order fans overwhelmed City And Colour's official website until it crashed.)

For Green, it was a chance to bring all of his musical influences and ideas together at last.

"This record is actually the culmination of 'me,'" he says. "There's been Alexisonfire Dallas and City And Colour Dallas, and for the last five years everybody's been talking about how there are two personalities of Dallas Green: the angry side and the quiet side.

"Maybe subconsciously I was over that — everybody compartmentalizing me. I thought on this record, 'If I have an idea for a rockin' song, I'm going to make a rockin' song. And if I have a quiet idea for a quiet song with me and a guitar then that's what it's gonna be, and I'm not going to worry about what people think a record of mine should sound like.'"

There's a chance this move will propel City And Colour even more into the pop music realm, where Green will have to contend with even more dreaded attention from the masses. While he's so far managed to straddle two worlds nicely — not just AOF and solo, but being an artist who can be win both a MuchMusic People's Choice Award and a Juno Award for songwriting — it remains to be seen what he'll do if City And Colour becomes a pop culture brand.

Green says he certainly has no intention of leaving Alexisonfire, or of dropping the "band" moniker. ("The thought of somebody wearing a 'Dallas Green' T-shirt makes me sick to my stomach," he claims.)

Ultimately, the formula he's adopted, even with all its pitfalls and pressure and self-imposed anxieties, is actually working.

"Last night, I was working on a new song and I wrote this line: 'I've always been dark, with the light somewhere in the distance.' And that's how I feel. I guess I've just figured it out.

"People say, 'Why are you so sad?' I'm not. I'm a generally happy person. I'm fucked up when it comes to some stuff, but I think I'm OK with it. That's just how I am. I don't think I can get rid of it, and I don't know if I want to."