Walking through the back halls of Caesars Windsor, there is a specific kind of sterile quiet that only exists in a casino before the house lights dim. It is the sort of space that feels at odds with the raw, bleeding-heart discography of Dallas Green. But on Nov. 20, the man behind City and Colour brings that heavy emotional weight to Southwestern Ontario for a one-night stand that promises to bridge the gap between his post-hardcore roots and his status as a multi-platinum folk titan.
Green is an anomaly in the Canadian circuit. He is one of the few artists who managed a genuine groundswell transition from the screaming pits of Alexisonfire to the hushed, reverent theatres required for hits like “The Girl”, “Sleeping Sickness” and “Save Your Scissors”. He has spent the better part of two decades building a canon defined by adoration and a specific, sharp-edged melancholy.
His latest effort, *A Pill for Loneliness*, recently hit the shelves and immediately did what City and Colour records do: it went to number one. It is a staggering streak of commercial dominance for an artist who seems almost allergic to the typical machinery of pop stardom. When we sat down to talk about the mechanics of this success, Green was quick to dismiss any notion of a calculated formula.
“I’ve always just sort of made records the way, I think I’ve made them the same way every time,” Green says. “Some I change and I try new things out here and there. Try to write better and sing better. That’s also just sort of a personal pressure I put on myself. I don’t really think about pressure from outside opinions because I’ve never done that.”
That lack of external influence is not just a posture. Green has navigated the industry with a fierce, almost territorial grip on his output. In an era where labels often demand a dozen co-writers and a polished TikTok hook, he remains an outlier who values the sanctity of the edit.
“I’ve remained an independent artist this whole time in order to have creative control over what I do,” Green explains. “I just try to get it to a place where I feel good about it. Where I can smile and say, ‘Yes, that’s good.’ Then I just put it out and hope that somebody else will listen to it and sort of pick up what I’m putting down in a way.”
The songwriting process for Green is less a structured labour and more a series of lightning strikes captured on a mobile device. He does not clock in at a desk. Instead, he waits for the world to provide a spark, whether it is a line in a book or a flickering image on a television screen in a lonely hotel room.
“I just write,” Green says. “I just sort of don’t pick up a guitar and try to write a song every day. I’m just not wired that way. I play a lot. I think about writing a lot. I think if I wrote as much as I thought about writing, I would probably have twice as many songs.”
This cerebral approach means songs often gestate for months. A melody might sit in his phone for a year before it finds a home. It is a slow-burn methodology that ensures only the most resilient ideas survive the trek to the studio.
“The process is just sort of, maybe I’ll be reading a book, or watching TV, or just out and about on tour and something strikes me,” Green says. “I’ll write a word down in my book or on my phone. The same thing is with when I’m playing guitar. If I come up with a melody that I think is okay, I’ll just sort of put it down in my phone, record it, then just sort of slowly work on it.”
He admits that the "lightning bolt" song—the one that arrives fully formed in twenty minutes—is a myth in his world. “I don’t think that I ever sat down and just written a song in one day. That really rarely happens for me,” he admits. “Then when I record, it’s just that every time I’ve recorded has been a little bit different just based on making it with different people, in different studios, and different times in my life.”
When it comes time to actually track the music, Green takes on the role of the architect. He builds the skeleton in private before allowing any collaborators to see the blueprints. It is a protective measure, ensuring the DNA of the track remains pure before the volume goes up.
“The recording is just sort of, I demo everything by myself,” Green says. “I play all the instruments on the demos myself and just try to get a framework of what I think a song, sort of where I want it to head, what direction I want it to head in. Then I go into the studio and invite some of my friends over, and we just start hacking away at it.”
There is a certain restlessness that permeates *A Pill for Loneliness*. It feels like an album made by someone who cannot quite find a comfortable place to sit. When asked if he still identifies as a restless soul, Green does not hesitate to confirm the diagnosis.
“I think so,” Green says. “I’ve never really been a calm-minded person. My mind is always kind of racing and thinking. Like I said, I think about stuff as opposed to just working through it. If I did as much as I thought about doing, then maybe I’d be a little less restless.”
Music, for Green, is the only sedative that works. It is a way to purge the noise of a racing mind and translate it into something tangible. “I don’t know. I’ve just always used music as a way to get out of that head space,” he notes. “Then you just try to make it in a relatable enough way that somebody else can listen to it, and take what they need from it.”
No, to me, it’s the same amount of energy. It’s just displaced differently. Being in a room filled with people who are screaming, and running around, and moshing... is one thing. But being in a room, standing by myself with an acoustic guitar and trying to get the room as quiet as possible is another. But, it’s still the same amount of energy. You just got to focus it differently.
Interestingly, *A Pill for Loneliness* did not start with a grand design. There was no mood board or thematic mission statement. It was a collection of fragments that coalesced over a year of low-pressure sessions.
“No,” Green says regarding a pre-planned vision. “When I started, I had a group of songs. I don’t think I even had all of them written yet when I started recording. It was just my two friends that I made the record with, they just kind of said, let’s start recording your new songs.”
The recording process was an exercise in patience, a luxury rarely afforded to artists in the modern streaming economy. “I usually, when I’ve made records before, I would have a batch of songs and go in and record for a couple of weeks and then be done,” Green explains. “This time it was just sort of no real deadline or idea of what was happening. Just sort of a, let’s just start recording these new songs I have and see where they take us. Then after a year of kind of going in every couple of weeks here and there, we ended up with this.”
The title of the album itself is a bit of a grim social commentary. It was born from a news cycle that highlighted the increasing isolation of the digital age, a concept that Green found both fascinating and repulsive.
“I was just reading and watching the news a lot when I was finishing up the record,” Green says. “I saw a segment on the news about how scientists are trying to invent a pill for loneliness because they believe that it’s a worse epidemic than obesity. We’re living in the loneliest era of human civilization on record.”
For Green, the idea of a pharmaceutical fix for a spiritual problem felt wrong. He argues that we already have the cure, and it does not require a prescription.
“I just found it very disheartening and sort of just found it kind of sad that this is the world we live in where we’re just trying to make a pill to make everybody’s problems go away,” Green says. “Then I just thought to myself that music to me has always been a pill for loneliness. It’s always been a place that I can go to whether to listen to songs, or write, and sing them.”
He draws a sharp distinction between being alone and being lonely—a nuance often lost in the noise of social media. “You feel a little bit less alone,” Green says. “I think there’s a difference between feeling lonely and being alone because you can be surrounded by your family and friends and still feel lonely. Music has just been that for me, and I know it is that for other people. That’s why I called the record that.”
Despite the heavy subject matter, Green is quick to dispel the myth that he is a perpetually somber figure. The "sad guy" trope is one he finds amusing, if a bit reductive. He is a man who enjoys life; he just does not find much inspiration in the sunshine.
“People just sort of take the misconception that that’s the way I am at all times,” Green says. “But it’s just what I like to write about. It’s what I use to get myself out of those moments. That’s what I mean when I say I write songs to help myself. Then I hope that they can help somebody else after that.”
He points out that the high points of life—the beer with friends, the excitement of a basketball game—are meant to be lived, not necessarily documented in song.
“When I’m happy and say out with my friends at a basketball game, or I’m at the bar drinking beers, I don’t feel like writing songs about that whatsoever,” Green says. “I just have no interest in writing about those feelings because those feelings are great, and they’re in the moment, and I’m feeling them. But when something’s weighing on me or I am observing something that I feel distraught about, then I use writing songs to get myself out of it.”
This desire for the music to stand on its own extends to the visual presentation of City and Colour. If you look at his album covers, you will rarely see a clear shot of Green’s face. It is a deliberate choice to de-emphasize the celebrity and elevate the art.
“Not really,” Green says when asked if he likes his face on covers. “I’ve never really did. I mean it’s even the same reason I didn’t call the thing Dallas Green because I’m just not that comfortable. To me, it doesn’t have to be about me. It’s more about the music. That’s sort of how I’ve always wanted it to be is just about the songs. I guess I just don’t have that much of an interest in having my face plastered all over the place, I guess.”
Some of these songs, however, are so deeply personal that they act as a direct window into his private life. Tracks like "O’Sister" or "Little Hell" are not abstract metaphors; they are dispatches from the front lines of his family dynamics.
“Sure, certain ones are a little bit more personal than others,” Green says. “Sometimes, occasionally songs will just come to me. I’ll get a good melody going. There’ll be a line somewhere that just sort of, I can write a song. Just from, I guess the nature of being a songwriter for this long. I can separate myself a little bit from them.”
But the separation is not always possible. “But I mean a lot of them are just tied directly to things in my own life, for instance, a song like O’Sister or Little Hell,” Green explains. “That’s about my sister, about our relationship, my relationship with her. People will ask me, ‘Well, what’s that song about?’ I’m like, ‘It’s about my sister.’”
There is a communal healing that happens when these songs are released into the wild. Green has become an accidental therapist for a specific demographic of fans—men who were raised to keep their emotions under lock and key.
“I know that people have told me that they’ve listened to that song and it’s helped them,” Green says. “You don’t have to listen to that and relate to it because you have a sister. It can be just about any person that you know that struggled. It’s sort of just about that. I wrote that song for myself to help me deal with this thing I was going through. Then the hope is that somebody can hear it and do the same thing with it.”
He takes particular pride in the way his music breaks down the walls of traditional masculinity. “I’ve met a lot of people over the years too, which is nice that they have never said they don’t know how to express their own feelings,” Green says. “They have a hard time. There’s a lot of men, right?”
He continues with a grin: “A lot of big scary, tattooed men I think could feel like they can cry talking to me because I have tattoos. They don’t feel as vulnerable, but I kind of just always tell them, just because you’re a man, its okay to express your feelings. It doesn’t make you a pussy, I guess what I’m trying to say to these big goofballs.”
When the conversation shifts to his recent success with "Strangers", a track that has dominated the rock charts, Green remains unfazed. The metrics of the business hold little interest for him.
“No, not really,” Green says about whether he knew the song was a hit. “I never think that way. I don’t think about music in terms of a chart, or numbers, or anything like that. Maybe that might sound cliché, but I really don’t. I mean, I have a couple of people in my life that have been around me forever that helped me put the music out and get it out there, but I never think about that.”
For Green, the industry's obsession with ranking art is a distraction from the work itself. “I just think about trying to make a song that I think is good,” Green says. “I’m just not built that way to think about charts. I know people that want it and try their hardest to get there and do that. Same thing with awards and all that stuff, but to me that just has nothing to do with music. It really doesn’t...”
He views the commercial side of his career as a necessary evil that allows him to maintain his lifestyle and his creative circle. “People turn it into a competition just because it’s a business model,” Green says. “I understand that side of it. I play the game just enough so that I can keep doing what I want to do with my friends and write good music that I think is okay. Hope that people take something from it.”
Of course, we cannot discuss Dallas Green without acknowledging the sheer volume of Alexisonfire. The band is legendary for its sonic assault, often resulting in noise complaints that could be heard three postal codes away. When asked why the band insists on being so punishingly loud, his answer is refreshingly simple.
“Because it’s great,” Green says. “Anybody who’s played a guitar loud knows how fun it is to play a guitar loud. It’s the best... Simple answer.”
And for those wondering if the band has mellowed with age, Green is happy to set the record straight. “We’re very loud,” Green says. “I think we’re louder now.”
The pivot between the deafening roar of Alexisonfire and the pin-drop intimacy of City and Colour would give most performers whiplash. But for Green, it is all part of the same emotional spectrum.
“No, to me, it’s the same amount of energy,” Green says. “It’s just displaced differently. Being in a room filled with people who are screaming, and running around, and moshing. We’re really loud and all that stuff is one thing. But being in a room, standing by myself with an acoustic guitar and trying to get the room as quiet as possible is another. But, it’s still the same amount of energy. You just got to focus it differently.
