Loss and departure are all over Rose Cousins’ new record, suitably titled The Send Off, but it’s not a melancholy record, despite it all.
Recorded three years after her debut record and a product of years of gigging, it’s the sort of mature sound that some musicians would despair of achieving.
A P.E.I.-born Halifax resident, Cousins comes out of the furiously productive East Coast music scene, a place where a collegial, supportive atmosphere seems to have trumped the competitive balkanization that reigns elsewhere.
“Not everybody who lives out here is necessarily from here,” says Cousins, “but a lot of us are, and we mostly grew up in smaller communities, and I think that lends itself to there being more room for everybody and not so much a competition as much as how we can all help each other.”
Cousins looked for — and found — the same sort of support when she searched for a producer for The Send Off, settling on Luke Doucet, another Maritimer whose work as a producer has attracted as much attention as his own music. The result is an evocative, airy record full of iridescent textures.
“Luke told me not to be too overprepared so that we’d be open to the process,” Cousins recalls. “Each day when we approached the studio, I would play a little demo for the musicians and the song would be built that day in a no-holds-barred, wide open kind of deal, and Luke was amazing at driving that process and saying ‘Let’s try this’ whether we ended up using it or not. He’s brilliant in that sense.”
The record’s themes were the product of Cousins’ life in the three years since her debut album, If You Were For Me. A period that saw the death of her beloved grandmother — a blow that ended up inspiring The Send Off’s title track.
“I guess the inevitability of having to let go of things as we get older, the age that I’m at and losing my grandmother and realizing that there’s nothing you can do, and you can keep someone in your memory — it applies to so many things.”
The years spent on the road also gave Cousins an appreciation for the work a musician needs to do these days, where the record industry’s ongoing creative destruction has made so many artists into entrepreneurs as well as performers. That led to a recent trip to Los Angeles, where she looked into the placement of her songs into TV and movie soundtracks — potentially massive exposure that many independent acts have come to rely on.
“When I’m on the road, it’s about me, it’s about the performance… But when you’re trying to get your music placed in TV and film it’s a different relationship, it’s like you have to present the song as the product. I don’t have to worry about the entertainment part as much as selling the song.”
