The Evolution of City and Colour
by Bryce Arbour
Last Wednesday I went to see City and Colour (aka singer-songwriter Dallas Green) perform at the Electric Factory. Though he started as a guitarist and vocalist for the post-hardcore band Alexisonfire, I realized that the evolution of his solo career actually parallels the evolution of music that we have learned about so far.
At the beginning of his solo career, he released the album Sometimes (2005) – a ten song acoustic collection. It is music at its finest: one guitar, one voice. It received critical acclaim and created a sizable fan base for him. At the show I went to, he performed the song “Day Old Hate.” He admitted that he had written it when he was 16 years old and never expected to perform it for anyone, let alone thousands of people in a tightly packed room. That’s when I began to notice that the beginning of his musical career was similar to the beginning of music itself. Much like the anonymous composers of Gregorian chant, his early music is simple, pure, and singular, focusing solely on one voice and one supplement (an acoustic guitar, though piano was added post-production):
In contrast, his second full-length release, Little Hell (2011) began to evolve from simple to more complex. Though it is mainly acoustic, he incorporated the use of percussion, bass guitar, and rhythm guitar on this album. This is similar to the way music evolved from Gregorian chant to the styles found in the Renaissance and Baroque periods – there began to be more experimentation and use of varied instruments and voices. The song “Natural Disasters” from this album contrasts the above song:
Furthermore, his latest album, The Hurry and the Harm (2013), evolved even further. The instrumentation is focused heavily on his band (rather than one acoustic guitar) much like music found in operas uses an orchestra as the supplement to a vocalist. The song “Thirst” highlights the distortion and effects used by his band as well (like Steve Reich’s experimentation in It’s Gonna Rain):
Though he stays true to his acoustic roots on each album, he has evolved musically on each release, from acoustic guitar, to subtle backing instrumentation, to a full band… Seems a lot like the evolution from Gregorian Chant to Renaissance/Baroque and then opera!
The Thousand-Year Ears 
One of my roommates has been playing “The Girl” by City and Color a lot the past couple of weeks, and I have come to really like the group. I think your analysis of his career as a sort of analogy for the development of Western music is really cool. Music, like so many other things, is not static and is constantly evolving. What is amazing to me is that the pace of change over the first few hundred years we have studied was so slow compared to the stylistic changing that a band like City and Color underwent in just a few years. I am looking forward to discussing the rapid evolution of modern music towards the end of the course!
I really like City and Colour. I remember hearing “Save Your Scissors” a few years back and falling in love. Dallas Green has such a great voice. There is an unsigned band called Green or Blue that you might like. They are virtually unknown but have some really neat covers (specifically of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” which is how I discovered them) and original songs as well.
I really like how you tied his evolution in music with what we’re studying. Evolution creates new perspective in the musical world. I think musicians in general should always lean towards making new kinds of music, so that not only does music can evolve, but so do the musicians themselves; they will have even more ambition and goals.
What a great analogy you convey in your post! I love tracing the history or the very first songs of a band I find interesting because I can see the way its music changed over time. As I browse through albums of an artist, I usually notice technological growth or development of an her distinct color. But I sometimes find myself holding on to the older songs more than the recent ones. The same applies to City and Color and the material we are learning in class. Each of the three links you have provided me were very enjoyable in their own way. Similarly, I think that no genre or movement is less complete than another.