Colin Stetson - The Love it Took to Leave You

"The first and titular song on my latest record, performed on solo alto saxophone, The love it took to leave you is a love letter to self and to solitude and to tall old trees that sway and creak in the wind and rain."
- Colin Stetson

The love it took to leave you, is the title track to Colin Stetson’s first solo recording since 2017. It features new ways of capturing his music and instrumentation, intensifying his practice and to continue challenging the historical canon of the bass saxophone while crafting emotive, haunting and harmonically innovative music. Recorded over a week in early 2023 at The Darling Foundry, a 144-year old former metalworks facility in Montreal now transformed into a 3500m3 contemporary art complex, with a voluminous main room that still maintains its raw architecture of brick, concrete and steel. Colin says “We were using the same live setup as I normally would to amplify—a full PA in the building’s spaces—so we were really able to move the kind of air that I can move—really saturating the room, hitting the walls hard. And then we further fleshed it out.”

Another chapter in a larger odyssey inscribed through every solo recording, The love it took to leave you is a story told through the singular melding of Colin’s breath and body, with an arsenal of saxophones and clarinet. Resembling a yet to be published graphic novel, each track plots a course in an overarching tale that spins through a range of scenarios, moods, visions and landscapes.This is the art of storytelling wrought instrumentally. His masterful catalog of film scores illustrate his profound knack for cracking the codes of music as narrative support—and as narrative embodied in his solo releases. Following last year’s award winning album When we were that what wept from the sea, a sort of sunset parable to the trilogy of albums he launched with New History of Warfare Vol. 1 in 2007—this one acts as a prequel, the origin story in his ongoing world-building dramaturgy. Fully conceived, but not formally written, he describes his elaborate storyline as a “scaffolding to write around, offering a set of images, scenes and an overall story arc, it gives the music shape and emotional contour. It’s not simply just offering up an aesthetic.”

Vulnerable and ferocious all at once, the album is a full-throttled culmination of decades of technical, physical and creative labour between a man and his saxophone. Colin has completely re-contextualized and re-articulated the instrument in passionately expressive and unorthodox ways. Dedicated to an absolute reality of the moment in his solo recordings: one-take, no virtual effects, no overdubbing, he’s developed meticulous modes of recording and production that capture and amplify every minute detail of his astonishing playing style. Entangled with his own physical body, he coaxes songs from his instrument using virtuosic circular breathing techniques that produce polyphonic overtones, creating otherworldly and affective harmonic passages. With an array of microphones and exaggerated sonification, his voice is captured by a dog-collar device on his throat, and the noise and rhythm of the finger keys and pads become enhanced percussive elements—as he stretches the amplification possibilities of the entire horn.

Admittedly his most fully realized work, The love it took to leave you is a perfect storm of technical, musical and compositional complexity and achievement. “The essence of it is me. It's the most personal thing that I do—and can do. There's an evolution of my body and technical capabilities that keeps on, so every time I make another record, there are things that I could only have played now.”