Make it through one of those stretches where life seems to be nothing but pain and trauma, and sometimes you end up with a surprising perspective. That’s borne out by the various trials and not inconsiderable tribulations that led up to the writing and recording of the Matinée’s sophomore album, Dancing on Your Grave.

In addition to biggies—deaths and dramatic relationship implosions—there were crises of a more existential nature. For example, the question of what any sensible person is doing playing in a rock band at a time when all the cool kids are sitting at the hip-hop, EDM, and stadium-pop lunch tables. It’s something that’s crossed the minds of singer Matthew Layzell and the bandmates (guitarists Matt Rose and Geoff Petrie and drummer Peter Lemon) that he’s known since high school.

Despite all this (and perhaps thanks to a successful therapy session or two), Layzell is upbeat in his assessment of Dancing on Your Grave. The album opens, tellingly, with the lines “I wake up in the dead of night/Can’t shake these sweats/Something just ain’t right,” these coming over gorgeously luminous six-string in the title track. What follows is a record that dresses up classic roots rock with flourishes of badlands guitar violence (“Fireworks”), back-porch banjo (“Long Gone”), and dying-days cello (“Anna Lee”).

There are moments of undeniable sadness, both lyrical and musical, but the album is somehow anything but depressing, the songs instead fitting in nicely on a summer mixed tape with greats like Tom Petty, the Old 97s, and Sam Roberts. Suggest that’s a monumental achievement considering what was going on in his personal life, and the singer-guitarist is quick to agree.

“It’s a therapeutic record,” Layzell says simply, interviewed over Blue Buck beers at the Regal Beagle on Broadway.

To understand how Layzell got to where he is today with the Matinée, it helps to rewind a bit to the dark days. The contemplative singer-guitarist admits there were a few of them between the release of Dancing on Your Grave and the band’s wide-eyed and buoyant 2013 debut, We Swore We’d See the Sunrise. Some were funny in hindsight, partly because they’ve made good battle stories for the road warrior files.

“The amount of touring that we did on the first record grinds you,” Layzell says. “At the end of the touring cycles for that album it was the classic story of the van heater broke when it was minus-30 from Ottawa all the way to Calgary. We were huddled in sleeping bags and—I’ll never forget this—the lights weren’t working, so at night we were driving with hazards on. For three weeks of driving, no one spoke. When we got home, that’s when our bass player quit and the band kind of went into remission for a while.”

And then there was a run of events, two summers ago, serious enough that they would take a major toll on Layzell’s mental health. He’s blunt in his assessment of the period that would eventually inspire Dancing on Your Grave.

“The lowest point in my life was the lead-up to the new record,” he reveals. “I’ve gone through therapy over it. Personally, I was really struggling.”

Part of that was because of the implosion of a relationship, the aftermath so messy that Layzell would rather not get into the details. He remembers hitting the road at that time when more bad news hit.

“No relationship ever just ends, so even though it was over, things got heavy to the point where I was blaming myself for a lot of things,” Layzell recalls. “I had to go on tour, and then I get the message from my family: ‘Your grandfather is going to pass—if you want to see him get to Ontario.’ Except I’m on tour so I can’t go.”

On reflection, he realizes he was shutting down except for those moments he was on-stage.

“I was avoiding emotions, avoiding feeling and connecting with people, by diving into touring. It was my one outlet where I could just go and crawl up on-stage, crawl into the van, and then crawl into the hotel and block everything out. I was never a substance abuser or anything like that, but I was definitely drinking and trying to block things out.”

When the tour ended, and there was no longer a nightly 50-minute escape from reality, things got truly heavy.

“I got home and had to start processing things—grieving my grandfather, grieving the relationship, grieving myself,” Layzell says. “I couldn’t get out of my house. There were three or four weeks where it took all of my strength to go to the grocery store and the coffee shop. I wasn’t going to work.
I couldn’t see the band and I couldn’t write. We had this looming recording and I had nothing. I really felt like, okay, this is my life now, where I’m going to be a hermit in a basement suite.

“I’d never dealt with depression or anxiety, but all of a sudden it was so real and instant. I remember being forced to go to the Biltmore for one of those cover nights where you pick a song and play it,” he says. “On-stage I was okay. But after that I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t be in the room. That’s when I sought counselling.”

The counselling helped, but what would prove even more inspirational was an encounter with a fan in Rossland. The Matinée played a show in the Kootenay ski town the night before Layzell’s grandfather died.

“It was a great show—this was when I was putting everything into shows because it was the only thing that I had,” he remembers. “I felt really alive that night. Afterwards there was a girl who wanted to talk and buy some merch. She’d seen us a few times, so I felt obligated to give this person some time because she’d been following us. So we just talked. Through the conversation I learned at that time she worked in a care home, and my grandfather was in a care home at that time.”

Things would get surreal and mystical the next day in more than one way. First Layzell—who says he’s normally never on Twitter but was looking for a distraction—logged in to discover someone had posted a random photo, of a guy in a boat shaped like a guitar floating on a lake in Gananoque, Ontario. That’s where the Coquitlam-raised singer spent his childhood summers back east with his grandfather.

“I was like, ‘How the hell does this happen?’ and then I look at the follower and it’s the girl that had been talking to me the night before,” he recounts. “So I messaged her and said, ‘Hey, just so you know, Gananoque is a very important place to me.’ She had no idea—it was a photo she’d tweeted out. We started chatting, and she said ‘Here’s my phone number.’”

That would be the start of Layzell falling in love with a person he’s now engaged to. And that would eventually lead him down a path where, suddenly, he became interested in life again, a creative burst leading to an avalanche of songs, 11 which would end up on Dancing on Your Grave. The extent to which he’s come back from the dark side is perhaps best reflected by the album’s final track, “My Heart Still Works”, which builds slowly from a spartan acoustic meditation to a symphonic slice of country-tinged heaven.

The title of the album, meanwhile, speaks to where he and his bandmates find themselves today. The cover image of a tiger moth is equally important, especially once you know something about Layzell’s grandfather. Like many in the singer’s family, he was a pilot. He got his start flying DH.82 Tiger Moth biplanes in World War II, the prop from one of which can be found in the family’s barn in Gananoque.

“Dancing on Your Grave just seemed to capture the essence of the record,” he says with a smile. “It’s a recognition of a common bond and where we were as a band, and symbolic of the tunes as a whole. I woke up from a dream—I have very vivid ones—where I saw my grandfather and the plane. I was talking to him about the record, and when I woke up I knew that the album art needed to be a Tiger Moth. So the first thing that I did was Google ‘Tiger Moth’. All these pictures came up, not of the plane, but of the actual moth. That sent me down a rabbit hole of researching, symbolically, what a moth means and, throughout time, what a moth has meant to certain cultures. Moths are about rebirth and also the energy you get from moving close to flame. It was so representative of what
I felt that I had gone through and what the band had gone through internally.”

Call it perspective, not to mention proof that sometimes there’s a beautiful payoff when things get ugly.

The Matinée plays a Canada Day celebration at Canada Place on Saturday (July 1).