With His Project City And Colour, Dallas Green Ventures Back on the Road To Explore Love and Loss

The road has become a familiar friend to Dallas Green over the course of his two-plus decades as a touring musician. Now appearing as the solo act City and Colour after putting out his seventh solo album under his name, The Love Still Held Me Near, Green will make a return to Dallas for the first time in two years at The Majestic Theatre on Sept. 12.

Green, 42, hails from St. Catharines, Ontario, but he maintains a special connection to Dallas, the city.

When Green first began touring in the States as a vocalist, guitarist, and keyboardist for Alexisonfire, Dallas was one of the first cities the band played.

“We did a long tour, kind of for nobody,” Green says. “We ended up going to Dallas a couple of times, and I have really fond memories of [the city]. I got my my knuckles tattooed in Dallas. I was, like, 25 years old, thinking, ‘I’m going to just get my hands tattooed to try to see if I can never get a real job.’ It’s always great to just be able to go down South.”

At the time of our phone conversation, Green is in a hotel room in Boise, Idaho, between tour stops in Salt Lake City and Seattle. He’s been doing this for so long that his days are running together. He’s unsure what day it is, exactly, but he is enjoying having a quick day off from performing and is planning to see Oppenheimer later in the evening.

Green says this particular tour is one of his most ambitious yet. During his 2021 show at House of Blues, he performed mostly solo, with accompaniment from his frequent collaborator and longtime friend, instrumentalist Matt Kelly. This time, he’ll be accompanied by a full band, and he teases some visual elements during his performance.

“I’m really proud of the production that we’re doing on this tour,” Green says. “It’s my first time implementing video screens and things into my show, and I think my crew’s doing a great job with that as well. So for people who’ve seen me a lot, it’s it’s a bit of a different presentation of it, but I think with the band, it’s still a ‘live’ feeling.”

The personal element of Green’s performance is particularly vital during this particular album era. On The Love Still Held Me Near, Green ponders love and loss. Born out of the most difficult time of Green’s life, The Love Still Held Me Near has Green grappling with the death of his best friend as he goes through the stages of grief by way of expansive sounds.

The title track was one of the most persistent in the way it presented itself in Green’s mind yearning for a catharsis, as he crafted a soundscape that would prove therapeutic.

“It was like an alarm going off or something – begging to be heard and letting somebody know that I was still there, and I wasn’t going away,” Green says of this song. “The phrase ‘the love still held me near’ came to me, and then it ultimately made sense to call the song that. But then for me, when I title a record, I usually try to find either a song title or a line from one of the songs on the record that doesn’t just represent the song it’s from but also encapsulates what I think the whole collection is about. And I just kept coming back to that phrase as sort of a mission statement for the entire record.”

Green admits he’s not much of a “bulk writer.” He doesn’t aim to write songs every single day, but he also doesn’t consider the periods in between writing songs as “writer’s block.” Green has found that his process involves allowing ideas to come to him in due time.

Green’s phone contains several files of voice notes, as well as Notes app jottings of ideas and phrases upon which he expands over time.

“When a melody really starts to stick in my head over and over, that’s when I feel like it’s time to go and put something together,” says Green. “but there’s no system like, I write the music first and then the words. It’s sort of a real hodgepodge system where whenever it happens and presents itself is where I start.”

The album’s opening track, “Meant To Be,” has callbacks to Green’s Catholic upbringing. Though Green says he’s “not much of a believer,” he found himself ruminating on religion and spirituality during the grieving process, and on what God and the universe mean to other people. “I like to try to ask these big, unanswerable questions of myself, and put them into a short song with a nice melody.”

Equally riveting is the song “A Little Mercy” on which Green asks, “Are we not supposed to love in fear of losing someone?” He wrote this song as a means to get certain feelings off of his chest, and posits that as humans, we simply should feel and offer love, even if it proves devastating. Something Green has learned is to find balance within the devastating moments and the blissful moments.

Additionally, Green has learned the importance of balancing life at home with life on the road. Having been a touring artist for so long, he admits he has grown comfortable with this “chaotic way of living.” The pandemic was the longest time Green had been home since he began touring, and that period evoked more gratitude for Green once he was able to return to the road. It also made coming home more enjoyable.

“If I think about the way I used to tour when I was younger – sleeping in a van, getting my knuckles tattooed in Dallas and sleeping on people’s floors, being too young to understand how dangerous all of that was, I’m lucky that things have worked out and I have a better infrastructure on how to roll down the road,” Green says.

In tandem with navigating the cities on his tours, Green has also been navigating a rapidly changing music industry. All seven of his albums as City and Colour have been released independently. He owns the rights to his master recordings and his publishing, an issue that has become heightened by the likes of Taylor Swift, Halsey and other major-label counterparts.

Though in the age of streaming, many artists have found themselves shortchanged once they receive their payouts, Green admits that he would be remiss if he said this has posed a hardship for him, particularly given the longevity of his career. But as narratives surrounding the idea of artificial intelligence that might someday create music continue to trouble artists, Green encourages artists to move through the landscape on their own terms as much as they can.

“The artists are rarely the ones that reap the benefits from the work, and the art, and the creation,” Green says. “It’s usually somebody else who has their hands in your pockets. So I think with the dawn of the internet, you can build your own version of whatever you want. You can make your music in your bedroom as you want, you can upload it yourself, and you can try to build a fan base on your own with social media and things like that. So my advice would be to hold on to as much control of it as possible.”

City and Colour performs at 8 p.m., Sept. 12, at The Majestic Theatre, 1925 Elm St. Tickets are $40.50 to $80.50.