Half Moon Run have always believed in the importance of taking one’s time with things.
Like fellow indie rock outfit Grizzly Bear, the Canadian’s songs revealed themselves slowly. Their lyrics were contemplative, their compositions thoughtfully layered.
The band’s sincere approach earned them several Juno Awards in their homeland and a strong fanbase around the world (their second album, Sun Leads Me On, was a top 40 hit in Australia) but a lot’s changed since they released their last album, A Blemish in the Great Light, almost four years ago.
They lost multi-instrumentalist Isaac Symonds, for one thing, and also had to contend with the pandemic impacting their future plans.
With the founding trio in place (Conner Molander, Devon Portielje and Dylan Phillips), Half Moon Run released their fourth album, Salt, earlier this month, and it might be their most fundamental album to date.
“While making this record, it felt as if we were boiling down a huge cauldron of musical ideas, trying to reduce it to something elemental,” says Molander. “What we were left with was Salt.”
Take album standout “9beat”: lead vocalist Portielje went through several hundred different Tascam recordings, mining for the correct content, before finalising the song. Several other songs took the better part of a decade to create.
Love Indie?
Get the latest Indie news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
Things take time, particularly when a truly collaborative effort is involved. “This record represents a broad, sweeping scope of output from different eras of this band,” as they explain.
To celebrate the release of Salt, Tone Deaf got Molander and Portielje to break down each song in more detail, which you can check out below.
Half Moon Run’s Salt is out now via BMG.
Salt Track by Track:
“You Can Let Go”
A tumultuous, transformative journey through the dark places of the mind towards, hopefully, the light. The chorus of this song came years before the rest. We initially thought it might work on a song called “Then Again” from our third record, but the mashup didn’t work. I believe there’s a video on YouTube of us performing that doomed arrangement at a festival in Ottawa.
Devon, in particular, continued to believe in that chorus and developed a vision for how to structure the verses around it. He made a little demo version by himself and showed it to us. We started recording the song, putting the instruments together before he had lyrics for the verses. It’s always a bit dangerous leaving lyrics until the last minute, but in this case, Devon came through quite heroically. He went into the hallway with his laptop and wrote all the words in just an hour or two.
Hearing him deliver the vocal that night in a style he’d never done before was a huge rush. After all these years of working together, there are still very frequent moments like this – where I find myself in awe of my bandmates.
“Alco”
Devon took a ukulele on a trip to Thailand in 2012. When he returned to Montreal, he played the opening riff of “Alco” for us – and we loved it! We started developing the song around that time but kept running into roadblocks with the arrangement. The incessant 16th notes would wear us down while we were working on it, and we had trouble finding the right sonic space to fit the elements together.
There are a lot of different musical “sections” that we tried and then ultimately ditched along the way. Our producer on this record, Connor Seidel, was undaunted by the challenge, and together we finally cracked the code in the spring of 2022. Personally, I love the elven textures that decorate this recording – it feels mystical!
I think that may be a carryover from 2012, when we first experimented with the song at a winter cabin. I was re-reading Lord of the Rings at the time, enjoying the passages about how brilliant the elves were musically and dreaming about what their music might’ve sounded like.
“Hotel in Memphis”
This song has been in the works since 2011 – and at one critical point, it nearly threatened the band’s very existence! That story, however, is for in-person conversations only. We also attempted to record it on our second record, but that didn’t work out either (although there are some very good things about that recording – amazing drum sounds, for instance – but the lyrics were deeply flawed, and we were playing it about 15 bpm too slow).
The important thing now is that this recording seems to slam and doesn’t appear to pose any more dangers to our existence!
“Everyone’s Moving Out East”
In the thick of the pandemic, it felt as if many people were uprooting their lives and moving on to some greener pasture. There’s a bittersweetness that naturally surrounds moments of significant change, and that’s kind of what this song is about. It’s become a favourite among our friends and families on the inside.
It was the last song written for this record – completed during the sessions. The strings you hear are a mixture of high-quality samples sourced by Devon and real strings arranged creatively and unconventionally with the help of Connor Seidel. To me, the strings seem to “gently weep” in a beautiful and sad way – a perfect fit for the lyrics.
“9beat”
An exploration of regret-tinged yearning to undo or, daresay, repeat the mistakes of yore, and the unexpected outcome of those choices.
This is another one that took about a decade to figure out. It was the drum pattern that came first – we knew we had something there. Figuring out the arrangement was the hard part. We have literally hundreds of demo versions of this in our archives. When dealing with non-standard time signatures (9/8 in this case, with sections in 4/4 as well), there’s a risk of sounding “math-y.” It’s not always easy to maintain a natural sense of flow.
There were melodic elements that we knew we loved (the falsetto vocal hook, for instance), but it took quite a while for everything to find its proper place. You might notice that the piano gives it a slightly Latin feel – I really like that about it. The single-note Moog melody adds a unique voice as well.
It took a few rounds of revisions during the mix phase to get that synth up to the right volume – it’s not self-evident that a line like that would be as prominent as it is. There’s a narrative that gradually builds as the song unfolds and an accompanying feeling of spiritual ascent (despite the darkness in some of the verse lyrics). We’re all very proud of how this one turned out.
“Dodge the Rubble”
Another song from the very earliest days of Half Moon Run, well before the release of our debut record. Devon and I were living together at the time, and I remember writing the lyrics with him while sitting on the front porch of our apartment in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood. Hearing this song always takes me back to that time. There’s a youthfulness about the city’s images of rubble and decay.
Initially, I think we felt a bit hesitant about those lyrics, but as time went on, we grew to like them more and more. It’s a real privilege to be able to commune with a younger version of oneself. We enjoyed that privilege through making this record, and in fact, it’s become one of the project’s main themes/talking points.
“Heartbeat”
This is a song I wish Bruce Springsteen wrote.
“Gigafire”
Inspiration for the lyrics and mood of this song spawned from a news article about the wildfires in California in 2020. Gigafire is a new term to describe a fire 1m acres in size, and in 2020 there was the first gigafire in modern history. We wrote the song while under lockdown (with an 8:30 pm curfew) in early 2021.
As it turned out, the writing process would consistently “heat up” at around 8 pm… something about the pressure of fighting the clock. The forbidden bike rides home afterwards added some extra excitement to the process.
“Goodbye Cali”
We refer to this track as a “barn burner.” We compressed the shit out of it! In some sense, it’s about how it feels to be on tour – a combination of disorientation and great fun. The contrast between the verse and chorus sections was really fun to play with. We got a bit lucky with that, maybe.
“Salt”
I would venture to describe this one as spiritual – though not in any conventional sense. The swelling synths evoke a slow-burning fervour with pulsating rhythmic reinforcement from the rhythm section. Meanwhile, the lyrics search for the self and the One beyond all selves. I imagine a group of worshippers waving palm leaves during the post-chorus instrumentals.
“Crawl Back In”
“In the opening of this song, you hear a mountain jungle in Costa Rica, where the soul of the performance was found. You might also hear the streets of Istanbul buried in the song – where we recorded the performance in June of 2022 in a stunning old apartment. Since its inception in 2014, we have never entirely known how to capture this special song until now, and I hope we have done it justice. Time will tell.
