Kat Burns

No Need to Regress

Regularly listeners seem unaffected when hearing songs by Forest City Lovers for the first time, but it is the second, the third and the fourth time that pull people into the sound. There is an elusive quality inhabiting the best work by the Toronto-based band. Part of the enjoyment of listening again and again is trying to figure out just what that indefinable element is. One plausible explanation is that songwriter Kat Burns has mastered the art of telling stories that portray innocence under threat. Her quiet, nuanced vocal work makes the protagonists in her lyrics seem delicate while the landscapes they traverse are frequently ominous.

On the third full album from the band, Carriage, which was released June 29, 2010, Burns and company have taken an intriguing step. The fresh feel of their 2008 outing, Haunting Moon Sinking, largely remains intact, particularly on the perky ‘If I Were A Tree’, which closes out Carriage. Yet many of the new songs feature a different sonic atmosphere, one that is moodier and darker than Forest City Lovers have previously produced. ‘Keep the Kids Inside’, a stately number with a military beat, is immediately compelling. Burns refers to the track as a ‘death march’ inspired by the paranoia and fear simmering beneath life in the suburbs. ‘Believe Me’ is another standout, an eerie skip-and-dance of accusations and rebukes.



Canadian Interviews was fortunate to speak with Kat Burns for the first time in the summer of 2009. In that interview, she talked in detail about the formation of the group as well as her approach to songwriting. For readers looking for background information, that original interview is available in our archives. This time around we caught up with the young artist before Forest City Lovers took the stage for a Sunday night show at the Phog Lounge in Windsor, Ontario.

A small but attentive crowd in Windsor heard the band successfully navigate their new material, the happy outcome of four solid weeks of rehearsal. The performance was just the second stop on a lengthy summer tour that will allow the group to refine their live show in advance of their upcoming album release event. That will take place August 12 in Toronto at the Great Hall on Queen Street West.

To get a sense of the shape the shows are taking, here is the complete set-list from the Forest City Lovers concert at the Phog Lounge on the fourth of July 2010.

1. Phodilus & Tyto
2. Tell Me, Cancer
3. Minneapolis
4. Light You Up
5. Sea to Land
6. Oh the Wolves!
7. Keep the Kids Inside
8. If I Were A Tree
9. Pocketful of Rocks
10. Constellation
11. Pirates
12. Watching the Streetlights Grow
13. Don’t Go
14. Country Road

There are plenty of opportunities to catch Forest City Lovers in concert in the coming months. After returning from their summer jaunt across the prairies to the west coast, the band plays in Toronto and Hamilton in August before hitting a number of venues around Ontario in September. In the following interview, Kat Burns offers a window into the making of Carriage. She discusses her artwork for the album cover, and she reveals her motivation for writing ‘Keep the Kids Inside’.

CI: Carriage is a rather loaded word with lots of different meanings. The album cover art seems to point to the idea of a circle or a wheel. With the word ‘carriage’ and that image on the cover, what element in the songs were you trying to emphasize? What were you trying to draw out?

KB: The title, yeah, it’s loaded word. I really wanted to have one word be the title. I wanted to find one word that sort of encompassed everything, and then I was talking to a friend and we were talking about the word ‘carriage’ and how it can be so many different things. I felt like it was appropriate: things you carry, your state of being, the way you present yourself – it can be everything.



The artwork was inspired by a really beautiful piece of Italian lace, hand-stitched lace that I just really became enamoured by. I thought it was very interesting how lace and doilies and things like that are commonplace, but if you look closer, there are some very detailed, intricate patterns and stitching. I feel like the songs are like that too with various levels and layers.

CI: Let me ask about sequencing the record. ‘Tell Me, Cancer’ struck me as a pop song but a really distinctive one. It was the song on the album that immediately grabbed my attention. You have that line in there about not wanting to draw yourself into any relationship where you would have to revisit any emotions reminiscent of high school. When you were putting the album together and sequencing the songs, did you want that one right up front? I thought it brought across the idea of forward progress.

KB: Oh, that’s cool. With sequencing, it took a long time to come up with something coherent. I wanted it to be listened to as a whole. Obviously we made the tracks strong enough to be listened to by themselves, but it’s nice to have the sequencing right. It’s bookended by two songs that were written a little bit before other songs. There are themes strung between all of them. So yeah, I feel like it was a really appropriate second song, a nice way into the album.

CI: ‘Phodilus & Tyto’ and ‘If I Were A Tree’ were on the seven-inch record from last year, and ‘Minneapolis’ turned up on the 2009 Friends in Bellwoods collection. So are these all songs that you’ve been living with for a while?

KB: Not really. Those three obviously were recorded and done last year, and there are a few others that have been done for a while. Some of them we played live for the first time when we did a radio session in March 2009. A couple of them were definitely almost done then. A lot of it was finished up in the fall. We went away for a few days and hammered out some arrangements and ideas, and came up with some different ideas for inside the songs.

I think ‘Oh the Wolves’ was the last one to be written, or ‘Believe Me’. Those were the later ones. They had parts of songs that we had talked about before but hadn’t worked. It was exciting for me because I was able to fit sections of songs that I really liked into a brand new song and make something of it! That was kind of cool …

CI: Another standout: if ‘Tell Me Cancer’ was the most immediately catchy to me, I thought ‘Keep the Kids Inside’ was the most interesting. There is a sort of military march appeal to it …

KB: Yeah, it’s a death march!

CI: Well, it struck me lyrically as an exploration of the pent-up hostility in the suburbs, just that strange feeling out there …

KB: That’s exactly what it’s about …

CI: … where no one feels like they’re living quite the way they want to, maybe.

KB: And everyone’s a little bit scared of their neighbours for no reason, and you’re a little bit further from them, which is funny. In the city you’re so close to everyone and you don’t really feel the same way. In the suburbs you have more space, but you still feel a bit more wary of everything.

CI: So do the origins of that song go back to your Whitby youth?

KB: The song sort of touches base on the feeling of living there, but it’s talking a lot about the industry there and how everything is sort of based on it. People do the same thing for ages, become used to it, and then the second things change it’s like ‘oh God, keep the kids inside – something’s going down! I don’t know what’s happening, but we’ll take the responsible route’. It’s a charade of sorts.

CI: Are there any plans to do a video for that song? I just thought it was one that would really lend itself to certain imagery.

KB: I don’t know. If people come up with an idea, yeah, that might be cool.

CI: Right now you have the one for ‘If I Were A Tree’ …

KB: I think we’re going to be doing one for ‘Tell Me, Cancer’. There’s someone interested, so hopefully.

CI: As this particular group of songs came together, was it more just stimulated by your personal interactions and relationships and travel, or were there certain books, paintings, films or other records that you were listening to at the time that really had a measurable impact on how you wrote?

KB: Hmmm. Well, I feel like I’m always inspired by transit, moving, different landscapes and people, and obviously interactions. I don’t know. There is a section of songs about my sister, and it’s the first time that I’ve written something about her. I’m trying to think about other specifics. … I haven’t really written anything about art or books I’ve read for a while. I used to do that more often, but now I find it’s hard not to be derivative of the subject matter that I’m talking about.

There are different places that I was that inspired things: upstate New York, Yellowknife – those are places I spent some time in last year that ended up in songs. Toronto, obviously – there are a few landmarks that are mentioned.

CI: As a resident of Toronto now headed out across the country on tour, you were, I assume, in the city for the G20 business. How did that make you feel?

KB: Well, I wasn’t down there. I didn’t see it. I saw it on the news, but that’s obviously being censored and manipulated, right? So I don’t know exactly what happened. I know that there were a lot of mistakes. I do know that a lot of people ruined it. There were a lot of peaceful protestors using their right to resist and speak, freedom of speech, and there were a few troublemakers that made everyone look bad. Unfortunately, that’s what made the news. That’s my feeling: a few bad apples spoil the entire bushel!

CI: As I watched it from a couple hundred kilometres away, I just thought of the whole idea of telling people that they have a right to protest and that they can do it here in a designated zone – that just seems like a way of lighting a fire under people.

KB: Of course! The whole thing, I think, was instigated because everyone needed justification for spending so much money. You need to have something go on.

CI: When we spoke about a year ago, I asked you what direction the new album was going to take. I thought it might be funny to quote you back to yourself. You said: ‘I know that I want to try some new things, and I think the band is focussing more on new arrangements and bringing new ideas in. I would like to push it and experiment a little bit. I don’t want to make a totally different record, obviously, because the band has this specific sound’. Now, looking at it from the other side of the album release, do you feel that you accomplished that, where you have some songs similar to Haunting Moon Sinking but at the same time you’ve built some bridges onto something else?

KB: Yeah, definitely. I think we really did try to push it a little bit. We did experiment with some different sounds. It was great working with Chris Stringer producing. He pushed us to try things that we may not have tried. His mentality was ‘try it – if you hate it, you don’t have to have it in there, but if you like it, you tried it!’ Our other producer, James Bunton, did some great stuff, pushing me vocally. I think we definitely tried new things, especially as a group, coming together on arrangements. There was a good camaraderie around it. We all felt really positive. I feel like it’s paying off. It seems to have been received well so far, which is great. But I’m sure someone out there hates it!

CI: I thought, for the first time, you have some songs on this new album where, if you wanted to, you could really amplify the songs in concert and make them a bit harder and edgier. For people coming out to see one of the shows this summer, what mix should they expect between the old and the new, and how similar in arrangement will the new songs be to what is on the album?

KB: Our set that we have to tour is a good mixture, for sure. We haven’t done a huge western tour for a year and a half, so people obviously want to hear what they’re familiar with. It’s a good mixture of both intentionally. We try to keep it close to the record. There is a lot more violin live on songs that don’t have strings on the record, just because we don’t have an organ. We spent four weeks practicing, arranging how to play them live. Hopefully it comes across well.

Date of Interview: 07/04/2010
Location: The Phog Lounge, Windsor, ON
Link: www.forestcitylovers.com