The woods, mountains, and skies of Vancouver Island are roaring places. There’s a wild feel in the air among the tall grasses and the fault lines. So says local musician Evan Cheadle, whose new album Fault Line Serenade, which comes out this Friday, is just the way he likes it: sad and mellow, incredibly reflective, and inspired by the place he lives in.
The album was written in batches and recorded in February 2020, just before lockdown first hit BC. Cheadle says that looking back, he feels there was a real sense of urgency when he rented a studio in Cedar to record the album.
“Especially the last few sessions,” he says. “In hindsight, you can say I felt like I needed to finish it quick.”
Cheadle has always liked methodical, melodic country and folk songs. It’s what’s easy to access for him, because he likes sad music, and that comes through on Fault Line Serenade.
“It’s a very personal record,” he says. “I just love that kind of music… I don’t know, I can just get into those songs a lot easier. I like the plodding rhythms of ballads; I can just sing them better. It felt kind of right whenever I was going through tunes and picking tempos. I like the rolling, wilting aspect of an album.”
Cheadle says that, in one sense, he misses the hustle and bustle of pre-pandemic life, when he was often busy touring with his band The Deep Dark Woods. But life is more relaxed now, and Cheadle says that will “distill itself” in different ways.
“I got a lot of inspiration just from movement and deadlines and things, whether self-imposed or otherwise,” he says. “I really get a lot of inspiration from travelling to different places, or even touring and coming back, I always felt like I had a batch of songs that I really wanted to get out. Playing music every night, being involved in that way, I think all just sort of funnelled into the creative process for me. So, yeah, I guess sort of having a wide-open schedule with no tours or other projects, I was writing but it was definitely coming a little bit slower.”
One of the most prominent sounds on the new album is guitar picking, a technique Cheadle picked up from traditional country. He says that the guitar is an instrument that a person can do a lot on, sometimes even using it to fulfill roles of other instruments.
“I’ve just always loved guitar-based music,” he says. “It does a lot, especially with pedal steel, too. The guitar is just so versatile.”
As a songwriter, Cheadle often writes in batches, he says, always looking for elements of songs that tie them together; that commonality is often a ballad borne from traditional country and folk. The songwriting process starts with music then is propelled forward by lyrics he comes up with.
“It has to be musically interesting and then I also have to have a lyric that I kind of get, that I latch onto, that makes me excited about a tune,” he says.
Cheadle often uses imagery to find words, as he did on the songs on Fault Line Serenade.
“The imagery of a serenade… I feel like the record sort of has that melancholic slow ballad texture to it, with the image of a fault line, which is sort of ominous and omnipresent,” he says. “I just like the… words together. They just sounded kind of good. In a poetic way, it sort of encapsulated the place, where I’m from.”