I resist the urge to ask Dallas Green to show me some leg.
Oh yes, it's true. The well-illustrated young man in front of me is talking about Son House, and how he has a tattoo of that particular bluesman on his body. Peculiar? Not really. It should surprise no one that the Juno-winning singer-songwriter who wears his heart and despair so openly on his sleeve would also wear his influences smack on his thigh.
"Son House's story is what attracted me to him," says Green, 30, who just released his third solo album Little Hell. "His voice, everything – it's so raw."
I wouldn't normally have connected any dots between Son House, the troubled but truthful Delta-born blues bleeder, and Green, more of the sensitive troubadour type. But look beneath the skin. Son House was one of those bothered Southern bluesman – torn between the preachings of Sunday and the carrying-ons and Devil's music of the night before.
As one of the members of the aggressive, post-hardcore band Alexisonfire as well as the artist behind the soft melodies and sombre sentiments of his solo project City and Colour, Green has his obvious flipsides too. Beyond that, he's a world-class worrier despite the fact that his career is shining brighter than ever.
"I don't think I'm necessarily as melancholic as my material," Green says, speaking in the townhouse in Toronto's Cabbagetown that holds Dine Alone Records, home both to Alexisonfire and City and Colour. "Writing has always been a cathartic process. When something has affected me, that's when I write. Or, when I'm writing, that's what I'm drawing from."
Apparently so. The quiet epics of Green's elegiac, beautiful Little Hell often find him fretful. Natural Disaster, while upbeat musically, concerns houses and upset foundations. The title track begins with Green, who is happily married to television personality Leah Miller, gently despairing "What if I can't be all that you need me to be?" and going on to use the word penitent. And Sorrowing Man requires no explanation.
"My mother is the same as I am," says Green, calm, well-spoken and particularly dour. He's bearded and extensively tattooed, but crisply groomed, attired all in black, from his shoes to his thick-framed spectacles.
The title of Grand Optimist refers to his father. Green, on the other hand is the "world's poor pessimist" who fears he'll die from complications that arise from "things that I've left undone." Asked about his father's upbeat nature, Green smiles. "My dad is always trying to talk me out of my worries."
Green has been known to cover Son House's Grinnin' in Your Face, an a cappella holler about duplicity and the rareness of true friendship. "It's true," Son House once said about the song. "It ain't foolishness. It's happening every day." Son House believed that blues music was about one thing only – a man and a woman. Everything else, he argued, was "monkey junk."
Along those lines, Green's material is almost exclusively relationship-based. "Other songwriters are storytellers," he says. "I hope my material is relatable enough that people can draw from the experiences."
The connections are being made. The first two City and Colour albums (2005's Sometimes and 2008's Bring Me Your Love) have gone platinum in Canada (80,000 copies sold). "I think it's the honesty, and the emotion of the music that's attracting people to it," Green says, when asked about his appeal. "It's not the any image or flashiness. Other artists do anything they can to conform, or they get people to help them write their songs. But I write the songs I hear in my head."
Confessions of a apprehensive mind are working well for Green, who needn't change a thing. Blues sell, always. In that respect, he has nothing at all to worry about.
Brad Wheeler