Premiere: L Con & Casey MQ detail crumbling anxiety with ‘The Art of Staying Tough’
The alternative creator examines mental capacity with this piano stunner.
Anxiety sucks. It often feels like being disemboweled. The whole town has flocked to your death, a public and bloody display unraveling in the town’s courtyard just as the clocktower strikes 12. The sun leers and pours overhead, its ray’s like daggers exacerbating the misery. There’s a certain morbid poeticism about it all, as your mind spins and twists and knots and releases quite unexpectedly. Lisa Conway, known onstage as L Con, frames her forthcoming new album, aptly and beautifully titled Insecurities in Being, around deteriorating mental health. “What will you do once you’re found it? And they see who you really are?,” vocalist Casey MQ pokes and prods on a withering and wretchedly gorgeous new cut called “The Art of Staying Tough,” which sees Conway take the backseat.
“There’s all this weight; you’re surrounded / This heavy heart won’t go far / Maybe all you need is some time to yourself / Do you learn the art of staying tough? / There’s no poetry till you find it yourself, even when your insides are crumbling,” Casey MQ trots forward, his visage riding off into the scorched earth of unease and lonesomeness. The production is appropriately sparse, spooky and a rather murky manifestation of a mind’s gentle spiral. Piano is the most prominent instrument (a clarinet seeping through the second half), as it slides between the cracks of Casey MQ’s earthy warble. “You can love, you can cry / Take the road less traveled by,” he later sings, his breathiness stretching the tension until it snaps.
Conway’s harmony work hovers just long enough to elicit a ghoulish tingling. On the song, she tells B-Sides & Badlands, premiering the song today, “Though I’ve started performing an alternate arrangement of this song live, ‘The Art of Staying Tough’ started its life as a piano ballad. As a songwriter, you often write songs that call for other voices to sing them, so I convinced my very talented friend Casey to perform it on the album ⎯⎯ he does a stunning job, FYI. Casey and I met while in residence together at the Canadian Film Centre. I’m a big fan of his work, so I’m incredibly grateful that he’s a part of this.”
Insecurities in Being is out May 25 on Wildlife Sanctuary Sound Recordings.
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