![]() ![]() “It's a little bit of a love letter to living in Montreal, but also about being in the desert, which is very far from where I grew up in Toronto and is, like, the opposite of everything I've known. “I started this song as this, like, space bop, and then I retried it again with just solo voice and acoustic guitar, and then we tried recording both in the desert because I thought, 'This will be the ultimate desert space bop!' We do have a really good uptempo version of it, but it didn't have the same feeling of being stranded on the moon somewhere.” “Around the time of writing this song, I was listening to a lot of Jonathan Richman and Christine McVie-like, all her Fleetwood Mac hits-and it's funny how much that came through in the production! I always feel like Jonathan Richman gets to my childhood self when I'm listening to him, and I was hoping to get some of that, especially with the backing vocals at the end-there's a bit of a Modern Lovers thing going on.” The lyrics are exploring these different ways we are expected to be-how much you try to contort yourself into an image that maybe was given to you from childhood, and does it feel truthful to you? There’s all these different expectations you put on yourself, and it’s a really joyful, electrically charged feeling when you realize you can keep all your ‘thorns.’” ![]() They both talk about femininity in really interesting ways. ![]() I was inspired by a singer named Cecilia from Spain from the ’70s-she was this super-underappreciated feminist songwriter who passed away really young and tragically-as well as this Polish poet I really love named Wisława Szymborska. ![]() “This is one of two songs on the record I wrote with Meg Remy. It's this idea of: how do you know you're in love? Is it this dramatic feeling, or is it something you might feel all the time, like the way you might wear a necklace from your mother? And it's also about how stupid we all get when we fall in love-it feels so dramatic that we act like idiots and do such crazy things.” I was approaching it from the perspective of a character in some play, addressing an audience who knew better than me what I was really feeling or what the end of the story is really going to be. “So many people have picked up on the theatrical quality of this song-it's almost like a soliloquy. “And then you’d notice all these different birds and animals crawling around at night, and the flowers open up and there’s a different scent in the air-that’s when the recording really gets going.” Here, Bulat guides us track by track through the album’s dusk-to-dawn journey. “We’d take a moment to watch the sunset for an hour, like it was our daily TV,” she says. And I realized all these songs I was writing were asking different questions about love and relationships, and I’m working through all those questions up to the last song.” Recorded mostly in Joshua Tree, California, Are You in Love?’s ebullient first act and more wistful second act reflect Bulat’s experience making the album, where ideas workshopped outdoors in the afternoon would be laid to tape amid the splendorous, mystical ambiance of the desert at night. I just really had to focus on life and be in it and go through it, and then come back to the music after. But this time around, I felt like I couldn’t use music like that. “On Good Advice, I was using music as a form of therapy. As Bulat tells Apple Music, Good Advice was about “going through a breakup-you go out with your friends and have a dance party, and we just happened to record our dance party.” By contrast, Are You in Love? finds the Montreal singer-songwriter in the throes of new romance (she married bandmate Andrew Woods in 2019), but also grappling with the death of her father. But the philosophies underpinning each record are dramatically different. It also strikes a similarly luminous balance between ’60s girl-group classicism and experimental, synth-tweaked futurism. Like its 2016 predecessor Good Advice, Basia Bulat’s Are You in Love? was produced by My Morning Jacket’s Jim James. ![]()
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