CITY AND COLOUR

J—It’s good to feel good. It must be refreshing to feel that energy from an audience, because being an artist is like being a tightrope walker: if you fall, you die. If you make it across, you live and everyone claps! Okay, this question has nothing to do with music but I’m just wondering if you’re a coffee or a tea drinker?

D—Well, to tell you the honest to God truth, I have never had a sip of coffee in my entire life.

J—Whoa. I feel like saying congratulations? [laughs] I’m drinking a big cappuccino right now.

D—Yeah, most people I know are the same.

J—Why is that?

D—I don’t know, my friend Stu, who’s our tour manager and sound guy, drinks like twenty cups of coffee a day. And he’s a smoker too…

J—Oh, no! He must have a fast heart rate.

D—I’m not really a hot beverage kind of guy.

J—Well, that makes sense. Stu better be careful, he may explode one day. [laughs]

D—Yeah I know [laughs]. My wife tries to get me to drink tea, but only when I’m sick, do I even think about having a tea.

J—I’m curious about how Dallas Green came to life. Where were you born?

D—I was born in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, 1980, September 29th, at the General Hospital in St. Catherine’s.

J—When did you first start playing music? Did it all evolve as a toddler, dancing around, or did you go see a singer at the local concert hall and think, “Wow. This is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.”

D—My parents were always really big music fans, but neither of them played instruments. When I was eight years old, they signed me up for guitar lessons…

J—…So it was a hobby that you did once a week, then it became more of a habit and then it just became life, I guess?

D—Exactly. When I first started, I hated it, because, you know, I was young, I was a skateboarder, and I just wanted to do that and play with my friends. I didn’t want to go take lessons, because at first it was like extra learning on top of school and I didn’t want to do extra learning, you know?

J—I totally know…I was a monkey when I was young. All I wanted to do was be outside, climb trees and spy on people [laughs] Now, in my life and where I’m at, I wish my parents had forced me to play music.

D—Exactly. So after a few years, I stopped taking lessons, ‘cause I started getting the ear for it, and that was it. I started being able to figure out songs by listening to them.

J—That’s great. I recently read an old interview with Bob Dylan and he was saying that he could go into a record shop and immediately know how to play the song after hearing it once.

D—Yeah, it probably took me a couple more times than once…

J—How did City And Colour grow its wings? When did that project really take off? As you were saying before, this project is kind of a side thing that you’ve always done, but I’m curious about when people actually started to take notice of this gem?

D—Well, before Alexisonfire started I was playing shows in other bands and playing shows by myself around St. Catherine’s, just trying to do something with music, you know? I guess I’ve kind of always been doing City And Colour, it just wasn’t called City And Colour.

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