This the first part of our two-part interview with Canary Complex. Click below to read Part Two.
Canary Complex, thank you very much for this opportunity!
Please introduce yourself.
Thank you so much for having me! I'm the solo artist behind Canary Complex, a solo visual kei project based in the U.S. I write, record, and perform the vocals and music, pulling from a deep love of 1990s~mid-2000s visual kei. My new album, A Whisper of Spring, is my most immersive release to date emotionally, visually, and sonically.
On April 24th, Canary Complex released his new album, A Whisper of Spring.
Congratulations on the new album! Personally, I hear echoes of MALICE MIZER and L'Arc~en~Ciel in it. How did you navigate paying homage without copying?
That's an incredible compliment. Those bands are sacred to me, so I always approach with reverence. I allow myself to be inspired by spirit more than form. I'm not trying to recreate a MALICE MIZER song— I'm trying to create something uniquely my own, but which resonates with a familiar atmosphere. I put a lot of value on being a songwriter first and foremost.
Mana, SUGIZO and all of my idols are tremendous songwriters with their own recognizable and distinctive musical DNA that is noticeable not just in MALICE MIZER or LUNA SEA, but in whatever project they work on. I strive to be that sort of songwriter, and I could never achieve that if I copy another.
I've written about “The Alchemist” in my previous album and in this one. That's the name I gave to the intangible thing that seems to happen inside me that makes the pen move and the song just writes itself—at times some universal deity moves through me with hardly any input from my conscious mind.
You performed most of the instrumentation yourself. Were there any unexpected benefits or challenges of working that way?
This has been my workflow since the first album in 2021. Then, my only reason was that I was shy about showing my music to anyone—no one else heard anything from When I Say Rain until I released it. But on the previous record (The Tragic Dance of Dying Leaves) and this one, writing and recording alone is a conscious choice.
I like to be in control of the end result. and that enables me to have a characteristic and recognizable playing style on guitar, bass and piano... all of which coalesce into the Canary Complex sound. It's rewarding to hear a full song come to life from something that started as a whisper in my head.
There are some exceptions, such as drums. I can't play drums at all. In the demo phases I program the drums for the sound I want but I need live drums in my music, so I brought on the amazing Jon Teachey for the first three songs on the album, and Michael Rumple (my friend/producer whose contributions to this project cannot be overstated) to play on the rest.
Also, I hired a Japanese accordion player named MITRA (みとら) to play on two of the songs. I am generally happy with my synthesized accordion parts, but her real accordion playing is very beautiful and emotionally expressive in ways that are hard to define.
That said, working alone gives me the freedom to obsess over the tiniest details until they feel right, without having to explain it to anyone.
How has your approach to the creative process changed from your previous albums?
With A Whisper of Spring, I gave myself more time and space to be intentional—mainly due to the very real and raw emotions that I was experiencing while creating these songs. More than on previous records, I embraced vulnerability in my songwriting. I didn't want to hide behind allegories and metaphors as much.
I still weave my lyrics into the aesthetic tapestry of the “Imaginary Paris” of the album, but when an emotion expresses itself more beautifully when stated purely, I allow it to exist that way.
I have never shied away from darkness in my music and lyrics. This album is no exception—a few moments are (to me) the darkest in my catalogue to date. I admit to getting chills from my own songs throughout this process!
But also, within this record I also allowed more light in. During this writing and recording process, I was desperately seeking a tiny glimmer of hope, the softest whisper of spring. In life, I didn't find one until much later... but in the music, I created the lighter moments of airy weightlessness to try and manifest them in my own reality. This record has moments of tenderness and romanticism that might have seemed insincere if I'd tried them on my previous record.
How did your producer and collaborators influence this project?
Michael Rumple, who co-produced the album and played drums on most of it, had a massive impact. We have a shared passion for this particular era of visual kei, and he is very knowledgeable about the recording, mixing and mastering techniques that helped to create the “sound” that defined our favorite records.
He has this amazing ability to take my raw demos and elevate them without ever diluting the essence. I write and record full songs top to bottom with every instrument, field recordings, samples of speech from old movies, and vocals added in, all loosely mixed by me to set the vibe that I want the song to hold by the end result.
He will replace my programmed drums with live ones (always a huge improvement from the demo), and I will re-record bass and guitars to lock in perfectly with his new drum part. Then, we set up in his studio and re-record the vocals to get the perfect take. We're both perfectionists, so this is generally the most time-consuming part of the recording process. He's a far better singer than I am, so he knows how to coach me until I've reached my full potential for whatever track we are working on. He knows how to enhance atmosphere and dynamics in both strong and subtle ways so that every song still feels intimate.
Having Jon Teachey on drums for the first three songs brings an energy and a precision that only a Grammy-awarded drummer could (he plays in my band Flood District, but it's his metal band Wilderun which earned the Grammy). By design, his drumming on Corsets Fall is so intense—I wanted the intensity of BLUE BLOOD-era YOSHIKI behind the kit. You just can't get that energy and intensity any other way than having the right drummer!
Last but not least there's MITRA (みとら), who recorded accordion on two songs (Déshabillez-Moi and Hyacinthine). Her playing enhanced my emotional storytelling, and added a breath of life (or a whisper of spring) to the two songs that I could never go back from. I'm forever grateful to everyone who lent their talents to this record.
Which song was the hardest to finish, and which came together the easiest?
Pierrot (deep sky) was the final song to be completed, and the one that asked the most of me. I carried this wordless song with me for months, unable to write the lyrics. It was like the song itself needed time to grieve before it could speak.
Then, one night in my car, basking in the violet glow of a Taco Bell sign (I wrote the lyrics to at least half of the record right here), the sky cracked. “The Alchemist” moved in me and the lyrics all wrote themselves in a single session, and I barely had to tweak them to fit my melodies after.
The song is a very real tragedy. The Pierrot is not the antagonist of the story—he is the CANARY KASEY-shaped entity that so kindly gave himself to to replace the parts that died—in the story of the album and in reality. This song carries the weight of a specific type of ending—the nostalgia, surrender, brokenness, and the echo of something beautiful and ephemeral. I never want to experience the pain which allowed this song to exist, but I'm so proud of what it became.
I don't know if I can say which was the easiest! Every song felt like a gigantic emotional undertaking. Even a song like Déshabillez-Moi which sounds very laissez-faire was very emotionally taxing, because it was the moment I was living in at the time of writing it.
I am also a perfectionist, and I obsess over every instrument in the song, re-recording a single part sometimes for multiple days until I have the one.
A Whisper of Spring will be available on streaming services, a Bandcamp-limited digital version, and limited-edition vinyl version.
The album has a gorgeous limited-edition vinyl version. What led to that decision, and were there any unexpected in its creation?
Vinyl just feels right for this album. There's a certain magic in the ritual of playing a record, and A Whisper of Spring is a ritual in itself—it was written with that immersive experience in mind. Just as my previous album The Tragic Dance of Dying Leaves, this album is divided into two equally distributed halves, for two sides of a record. I love how this format encourages the listener to pause, flip, and reflect.
I'm holding the record in my hands right now actually! I feel especially proud of this final creation. It was a bit of a challenge to settle on the final aesthetic design of the physical release. Eventually, I settled on the “Pearl Edition”—an iridescent white vinyl record, minimal and elegant- hand-numbered and limited to 500 copies.
The Bandcamp-limited digital edition includes 10 bonus tracks not found on the normal streaming edition. Please tell us a little about those.
The bonus tracks are sort of a time capsule to the creation of the album. I personally have always really enjoyed listening to early, in-progress demos of what would later become my favorite songs. I have loosely dated each of the demos in the title of the files, so the listener will know exactly where I was in the timeline of writing and recording this album. I believe that many of the songs on A Whisper of Spring have the potential to one day be all-time favorites to some people, so hearing an early demo might be a very exciting prospect.
Every one of the demos included is a rough draft or an early version of the song it would eventually bloom into—I have allowed them to keep their working titles as I had them at the time.
The only track that is an exception to this is an instrumental demo I had created as a cover of Premier Amour by MALICE MIZER. Those who know me are probably aware of my guitar covers, and how much this band influences my music.
Early in the process of making this album, I had the idea to create a cover of this song—instrumentally built from the ground up and with my own lyrics in English. I'm quite proud of the guitar parts I created for this demo, rough as they are. Before I'd ever gotten around to writing the lyrics for this one, I realized this album is so deeply personal that a cover could never fit. So, I made the right choice by abandoning that cover. I do truly love the song, and maybe one day I'll resume working on it!
You're also releasing an art book with the album. How did that project come to be?
The art book is called An Echo of Winter. I was inspired by the various visual kei books that I saw online and could rarely afford when I was younger: LILLIE CHARLOTTE by LAREINE, several from MALICE MIZER, LUNA SEA, Versailles... I always knew that I wanted to be able to release a book to expand the world of the album beyond just sound and into the visual and the tangible. Everyone reading this is aware that visual kei is as much about the world-building as it is about the music, at least within the parts that I am inspired by (shiro/kote/art/kurofuku kei).
It's a hardcover book: cloth-bound with gold foil inlay. It includes lyrics for every song on the album, liner notes, art, exclusive photos that won't ever be released online, some of my favorite shots from the album's PVs, and a special treat for those who are always asking me for tabs in the comment sections of my videos: guitar notation for every song on this album. It's a love letter to the people who've followed my work this far.
I wanted fans to have the option to own a collectible keepsake that they could hold and get lost in.
Please tell us a little bit about the limited-edition merch associated with the album.
Aside from the vinyl LPs and the book, the other limited-edition item is the VIRGIN SNOW hair barrette. It was designed in collaboration with a Raleigh-based jewelry brand called Coffin Keepsakes, and they also assembled each one by hand.
I wanted this to feel like it might have been pulled out of the Imaginary Paris of the album, like a souvenir from another time and place... but without feeling like a grandmother's old necklace. I wanted something that is also very wearable in a visual kei context. You'll see me wearing one or two of these in just about every photo or video from the last six months. It's such a crucial part of my wardrobe now.
There are two unique variants of these: A Drop of Blood and The Softest Pink. Only 100 barrettes were created in total—50 of each variant.
I also designed two shirts for this release: a minimal design that loudly exclaims Déshabillez-Moi on a slimmer “femme fit” white tee, and a vintage style halftone-dotted version of the album artwork on a black tee with a more androgynous fit.
These shirts aren't limited edition in the same way as the other merch items, but I work with a local screen printing shop to make them in small batches on my favorite very soft and well-fitting shirts, and ship them from my house. I don't trust print-on-demand merch, because I don't want a fan to spend money on something that I can't verify the quality of first.
VIRGIN SNOW hair barrette in The Softest Pink.
This is a two-part interview. Be sure to read Part Two as well!
