They repeated this process a few times, until Shauf felt the bones of the story as he imagined it lay close enough to the surface to be dug up by anyone who wanted to go looking. Refining the lyrics, he sent them to his friend, Nicholas Olson, who interpreted the overall narrative as he understood it. He felt unsure how far he needed to go to tie the tracks together. As he coaxed the songs for Norm away from their earlier, freestanding incarnations, he wanted to connect them without force-marching listeners through an obvious story. He bent and planed and carved them toward each other bit by bit, playing God and altering the lyrics until they had all been reengineered to belong in Norm’s universe. Once he realized he did, in fact, have the makings of another concept album, he began revising the freestanding songs he’d written for the original idea of Norm. It became apparent that “Norm” might work well with “Telephone.” He had already written several other unrelated numbers, but he started to imagine a collection of songs which all existed inside the same world as Norm. Eventually, he came to another song – this one about someone named Norm (“oh boy norm / on his side / clutching the sofa / eyes open wide”). The yearning intensity of the song went unusual places. Shauf hates talking on the phone, so, imagining someone different, he wrote “Telephone” (“i wish you’d call me on the telephone / i want to hear your voice / reaching late into the night”). It would be a set of unrelated songs, like albums recorded by other artists. What he really wanted was to make a normal record. Maybe, he thought, he would make a disco record. This time, the songs wouldn’t be the stage for a cast of characters he had bound together song after song in aching proximity, all of them making each other happy or miserable or both. Back in 2020, Shauf wasn’t planning to make a concept album or a clustered narrative. What would eventually become Norm started out in a very different place. He deliberately left open spaces through which readers could enter to find the story and create meaning for themselves. Enchanted by the sense of possibility and wonder that had made the film so vivid to him during that period of incomprehension, he wanted to create something similar. Eventually, Shauf realized his browser had crashed and the movie had frozen. It seemed impossible in its relentlessness, bordering on genius. What appeared to be a nearly static camera shot of a key on a table continued uninterrupted for two minutes, then five minutes, then seven. The voice of a fourth character appears only via a memory of laughter and a single line, relayed by one of the narrators: “are we leaving the city?” Watching a David Lynch film one night, Shauf found inspiration for how to frame his concept. Three are narrators, inside whose perspective Shauf submerges us for one or more songs. Norm’s cast of characters includes four voices in all. The story takes shape through little epiphanies, accumulating like debris from a series of implosions. He’s driving us out to a wild and dangerous place. The result is a recognizable Shauf production, but with a flowing landscape of suppressed grooves propelling the songs toward uncertain destinations. A lyric veers from a bird’s-eye-view to intimate thoughts. An uneasy clarinet phrase devolves into a busy signal. The tempo slows, vertigo slips in, or a discordant note appears. He sounds as if he’s sitting next to you, singing quietly in your ear, with the persuasive pining of Chet Baker, if Chet Baker sang in round Canadian vowels.īut listen closely, and deep in the music, a shift happens as the world goes sideways. In the middle of a line, Shauf’s vocals shift unexpectedly to a higher, plaintive register. Many tracks on Norm start out delicate and forlorn, with the feel of classic torch songs. But he’s taking the question further this time. It’s a classic Shauf premise to wonder whether we’re destined for disappointment and pain when people don’t love us the way we want them to. With Norm, he’s upended his songwriting methods, creating a deeply haunting and unpredictable universe. The Saskatchewan-born performer has already made a name for himself with television appearances and enviable reviews for his prior work, including his 2016 outing The Party, which The Sunday Times praised for “killer lyrics in music of extraordinary beauty,” and the night-at-a-bar drama of 2020’s The Neon Skyline, which Pitchfork called “a wistful, funny, and heartbreaking world.” Norm, the eighth album from singer-songwriter Andy Shauf, is a shimmering arc with unsettling silences that complete its story, the pop and hiss of a needle on a turntable after the song ends, emptiness like a trap door into something tender and terrifying.
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