Tragedy has a way of bringing out the best in songwriters. That’s certainly the case for Dallas Green on The Love Still Held Me Near, his seventh studio album under the moniker City and Colour.

The 12-track set, arguably the most sonically aggressive and stylistically expansive outing in the City and Colour canon, comes from what Green has acknowledged as the most difficult time in his life. Within the span of a year, he lost two crucial figures – his cousin Nicholas Osczcypko, with whom he played in his first band, and longtime friend, City and Colour producer and engineer Karl Bareham, whose drowning death in Australia while on tour was the direct impetus for The Love Still Held Me Near’s first single, “Meant to Be”. At the time Green was also separated from his wife of (then) 11 years and felt their marriage was “seemingly over.” Green feels those inspirations were vehicles to push The Love Still Held Me Near in its own direction of exploration and discovery.

“It’s not specifically about those events,” he says of the album, which was co-produced with longtime band member and multi-instrumentalist Matt Kelly. “It’s just an overarching theme of loss and the idea of trying to get through it.” Though he adds with a small chuckle that “it was like I was having this beautiful, perfect mid-life crisis,” the deeper purpose of the album is “asking good questions about life and then framing it in a way that anyone can find themselves in it. I know the experience I’m writing about on this album is not singular at all; it’s everything we have to deal with as human beings, trying to live and get through it.”

The Love Still Held Me Near certainly takes that trip from the emotional depths through the other side and finding a way to, as the closing track says, “Begin Again”. Throughout the album, Green questions the very core of his beliefs, spiritual and otherwise, and in the title track he wonders whether true healing is even possible. He ultimately concludes that it is. Even when he acknowledges that “hope is hanging by a thread” Green sings, “I know the beauty lies in dawn’s early light” and that “it ain’t enough just to be alive/we gotta lean into the love a little before we die.”

This is conveyed amidst a soundscape that dresses up the angst, tribulation and catharsis in sophisticated instrumental textures, ranging from waves of ambience to explosions of guitar-driven noise, with a wide array of touchstones in between.

“It was all about the love of things,” Green explains. “I had gone through the most negative, terrible aspect of living, and it was the idea that the positive and the love could still keep me, us, and my friends together. I like to write. It’s what I do when I just need to get something off my chest. It makes me feel better.”

Hailing from St. Catharines, Ontario, Green started City and Colour in 2005 as a (then) quiet counter to the band he co-founded, hardcore luminaries Alexisonfire, releasing songs via the Internet. They proved so popular with fans that he released City and Colour’s first album,

Sometimes, later that year which won the JUNO Award for Alternative Album of the Year. He has since released five more albums under the moniker, accompanied by a shifting lineup of musicians, and collected 4 JUNO awards, including two Songwriter of the Year awards, plus 1 Triple Platinum, 2 Double Platinum, 6 Platinum, and 1 Gold certification in Canada, and 1 Gold certification in Australia. In 2022, Green was honoured with the SOCAN National Achievement Award in recognition of his philanthropic contributions to music education in Canada. This marks his triumphant return to Riverfest Elora, after a spectacular headlining performance in 2019.