BANFF – In the advent of their third album, un|love, Reuben and the Dark is heading on tour across Canada.
Made up of five member, Reuben Bullock, Shea Alain, Brock Geiger, Ian Jarvis and Dino Soares, Reuben and the Dark has found a lot of success with its last two albums. Their song "Black Water" from its first album, Funeral Sky was featured in the latest Breaking Bad film, El Camino.
“I was in the desert in California and some friends slid their cellphones under my door while I was sleeping with the trailer playing. So I woke up to the trailer playing on four different cellphones. It was kind of a funny way to wake up,” said lead vocalist and songwriter Bullock.
“Very surreal to kind of look at these little screens and kind of try to piece together what was happening.”
According to Bullock, the song "Black Water" reflected the situation that Breaking Bad main character Jesse Pinkman, played by actor Aaron Paul, was going through. Though at the time it was written, Bullock wrote it from a personal place.
“It was kind of a tough time in my life, things being uprooted and feeling pretty lost. I think I wrote it at three in the morning, or something, staying up all night ... It was just what was on my heart at the time,” Bullock said.
With songwriting, Bullock’s approach often comes from a place of mystery and ambiguity. When he puts pen to paper, he lets his creative mind take over then releases it out into the world and waits to see what comes back.
“That’s what I connect to because I think life is so broad and concepts are so broad. I want my songwriting to also exist in that world where it creates landscapes for you to think and feel whatever it is that you want to think and feel when you’re listening to a song of mine,” Bullock said.
Bullock said music is like children. Once they’re born, their personalities are unknown and who they are is a mystery. With time and growth, that’s when a song starts to unravel.
“Music is very much like that. It’s very stream of consciousness. I sit down with a guitar, or a piano, and write a song and try to just stay out of its way,” Bullock said.
With un|love, it is an exploratory album for Bullock in which he challenges his own understandings of concepts, which he once thought of as concrete.
“Love being one of them – kind of an undoing of all of it and trying to flip a lot of meanings in the same way that putting ‘un’ before the word ‘love’ really turns the word ‘love’ on its back,” Bullock said.
“And not in an opposite or opposing way, it’s not anti-love. It’s just now existing in a place where I don’t have a solid definition for it anymore. I think that ended up being the theme across all the songs on the record.”
Although their album is set to release later this month, the alt-folk band released the first two songs of the album for listeners to preview, “Rising” and “Faultline”
Reuben and the Dark will be performing two shows on Oct. 18 and 19 at Banff Centre. The album un|love will be officially released on Oct. 25.
