Corey Isenor doesn’t care what you think. The Halifax-based musician doesn’t care about professional musicianship or the music industry. He doesn’t care if you read this article and he doesn’t care if you have heard his record Absinthe & Smoke before. We at The East care because we think Corey Isenor is one of the best songwriters in Atlantic Canada.
Isenor’s music is refreshing. Absinthe and Smoke is full of succinct, well-crafted songs that build interest by adding layers of density rather than sprawling out. Each song is full of mood-setting lyrics and melodies that have a great economy and precision while not seeming trite and simplistic.
The secret to his artistic success has something to do with his devil-may-care approach to public opinion and his fearlessness in the face of failure. Isenor earned this super-powered toughness from his time in art school and his cool-hand working as a professional photographer. Absinthe & Smoke, Isenor’s seventh record, which was released in August of 2019, is a flex of this might and provides us with some wonderfully pretty songs that have an endless depth for the submariners willing to seek it out.
We sat down at an appropriate distance from one another to talk about Absinthe & Smoke, his life and his art. This interview begins with a perfect example of Isenor’s temperament:
Isenor: Say whatever you want, I’m not intimidated by shit.
MacNeil: You aren’t shy to include complex thoughts and music in your recordings. I think that’s an interesting part of this album. Lots of complicated themes, song forms and melodies.
Isenor: That’s interesting, because I’m self-taught and the songs are usually me just challenging myself. It’s nice to hear that though. A lot of the time I feel like the song has to be more different in order for more people to like them, and though I’m learning that that isn’t true, I am still going to write complicated music and challenge myself anyway, because that’s what I like.
MacNeil: Would you say that it’s an artistic impulse to add layers of density to your work?
Isenor: Probably. I went to fine art school at Mount Allison University, and that’s where I learned to think. Everything I learned there about art makes it hard to imagine making art about myself and has made me much more interested in everything and everyone else. A lot of artists write about themselves, but I don’t like that kind of art.
MacNeil: That makes sense to me. These are the songs of a photographer, then?
Isenor: In terms of observation? That’s an ambition of mine as a writer. My older albums didn’t feel like they had an observational perspective. I was trying to open myself up to the world and hoping that songs would allow people to connect with me. It doesn’t seem to do that. Most of my best friends I’ve made and kept because of our chemistry and bond and not because of music. I’ve never really met a lot of people I’ve bonded with over my music. The fans I have made are totally random. A guy from Maine in his 60s loves my music and comes up for the shows.
It’s funny, because I don’t feel like I have a fanbase. But if you take all of the people from all of the world, I guess I do.
MacNeil: Nobody feels like they have a fanbase. Especially songwriters. If they do, it is pretty invisible.
Isenor: I like one thing about these quarantine live-streams: you get to see how large someone’s audience really is, not based on region. I’ve seen some people who couldn’t get ten people in a room in Halifax but have three hundred on a live stream and vice versa. If you are gonna look at me as a photographer and songwriter who observes, I care about the data and relationships like that.
MacNeil: There is a lot of data in the record. It’s densely observational, and there are only a few instances of you turning that on yourself. “Teenage Blues” is one of them, isn’t it?
Isenor: Not necessarily. It’s written in the first-person perspective, and though it’s directly related to me, it’s a composite of myself and other people. It’s a song that touches on an “ignorance is bliss” scenario. Nobody wants to take responsibility for growing up.
MacNeil: There is a Peter Pan Vibe there.
Isenor: Yeah. I do overthink and ruminate on the good moments in my life.
At this point in the interview, Isenor breaks into song, singing a line from his song “Teenage Blues”: “I tend to lose myself in memories of friends and lovers who have left me.”
Isenor: I yearn for those moments, but not who I was at that time, just good feelings.
MacNeil: How much of your day is spent with those feelings?
Isenor: Right now, despite this tragedy of the global pandemic, I don’t have to think about what I’m missing out on socially or romantically. It’s been a little rest from all the things social that tell you that you are failing. I don’t feel that pressure of, “Oh, you are single and your music isn’t taking off the way it should”.
MacNeil: Is that something you are self-conscious about? The fact that you are a bachelor?
Isenor: Oh yeah, all the time. I’ve been single for 10 years.
MacNeil: I meet people all of the time that have crushes on you.
Isenor: Who knows?
MacNeil: Speaking of relationships, I want to talk about your relationship with Liam Friar as a collaborator. I find your voice and his guitar playing hard to separate. They are so related in my mind; I think he is the response to your call.
Isenor: Totally. A mini-history of that: when I moved to the South Shore of Nova Scotia, I was introduced to Liam through Jennah Barry and Rebecca Zolkower. Jennah worked with Liam and I never considered asking him because he was so good. I wasn’t going to waste his time with my bimbo-folking.
MacNeil: Oh come now….
Isenor: So, we were just friends and we hit it off, and after a few months I showed him what I was doing and he dug it. Because I’m self-taught, I could never explain to somebody what I’m playing and what I’m doing. He’s the only person I’ve met that can listen and play along without having to stop and ask me what’s happening. I wanted to play with somebody that’s better than me.
MacNeil: In your musical relationships, you like people who push you.
Isenor: Liam pushes me because he’s so good. He studied Jazz, which is something I don’t know anything about. I say, “Oh I wanna try this chord,” and he says, “Do whatever you want!” He will be able to play it and know what to do with it. We’ve been playing together now for four years and we have so much comfort I feel like I can just write any song I want with him. Liam also likes pretty.
For a long time I wanted to be cool, and I wanted people to think I’m cool. I wanted to be Monomyth cool or Nap Eyes cool, but they don’t like pretty. Cool isn’t pretty. I started realizing that I’m not really cool and I write for pretty. I wanna play with a ton of sounds and Liam and I have just leaned into being pretty.
MacNeil: Corey, you are deeply cantankerous, and I think it makes you willing to go against the grain of popular taste.
Isenor: 100%. It’s definitely hard for me. I’ve always had a really hard time relating to people. I feel like I’m always looking to relate to people. I think this is the source of my cantankerous behaviour. I have Ares confidence.
I think it might also come from art school. It was a place where I learned how to better fail. You also learn that failure isn’t an emotional judgement, it’s just part of the conversation about ideas that you are having, and that conversation and the project you are working on can always be changed and refined. Once I learned that, the whole idea of being insulted by anything kind of went out the window. Don’t take anything personally or you will just hold yourself back from ever getting anything done.
MacNeil: Well let’s talk about ego and process. You don’t care if other people don’t like your music, but do you care if you don’t like your music? What’s your relationship with the music industry?
Isenor: Yeah, for sure. My songs kind of come up and I sing them in the back of my head. I spend a lot of time living in them. COVID-19 is a horrible thing, but not having anything to do made me have to spend a lot of time working on some material that I’ve had all the music written for, but hadn’t tackled the lyrics yet. That’s very different from how I usually write. Now I’m reading a lot of books and articles and it is opening me up to write about literally anything. Before I would feel like my songs have to be honest and true to myself and where I’m at. I can explore any kind of songwriting and write songs that aren’t about me at all.
I definitely don’t give a shit about the industry. There are so many instances of people being in the right place at the right time, but I’ve always felt like I’ve been behind everyone. I never had an interest in making money from music when I started because I was already in a fine arts school and thought I might teach at a university. I started playing shows in Sackville, which was a funnel for great music coming from Canada into the Maritimes, and I got to open for a lot of great bands.
I never related to the ECMAS or anything like that and wasn’t really trying. Now I’ve released 6 albums and have interacted with it a little more. I don’t buy into being a full-timer, and that’s often the expectation in the industry to get any traction. If you were in a relationship with someone who expected you to only be one thing all the time, a therapist would tell you to leave that person. You are a person, you can do whatever you want and still make good music.
Corey Isenor cares about making art that fulfills him first and foremost. Whether he is on-the-scene as a photographer or on stage as a musician, he can be counted upon to push his own boundaries, and the audience benefits from it. Isenor is a unicorn of sorts, having achieved critical acclaim as a musician without even caring for it.