Montreal-based Lubalin has never sought to stand still. Continually moving forwards, the songwriter re-shapes himself with each passing project, finding a sense of cathartic release in his work.
Out today – December 6th – new album ‘haha, no worries’ may have a title blessed with nonchalance, but every aspect is cared for in an exacting manner. Blending soft-pop aspects – so redolent of 00s indie-adjacent output – with cinematic landscapes, Lubalin blurs the lines between songwriting and aural painting.
Available on streaming services in full, ‘haha, no worries’ is a triumph – here, Lubalin breaks down his methodologies, and reveals a few potent secrets.
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dog
I love ‘dog’ because it’s actually secretly a sad piano ballad disguised as a big pop drum & bass song. I wrote it on the piano originally but when I was working on the album, I was exploring so many different iterations that I figured I’d try this song in the DnB sound that was emerging. After turning stone after stone, banging my head against it, something just clicked, and the whole thing just came to life. It went from a demo I almost cut out from the album twice to one of my favorite songs.
bullet time
Charlotte Cardin, Jason Brando and I originally wrote ‘bullet time’ for Charlotte’s album, 99 Nights. Despite our efforts, we couldn’t get it to fit her sound, so we shelved it. After finishing 99 Nights, Jason suggested I try reworking it for my own project. I was live streaming twice a week at that time so I experimented with different styles on stream. The first version of ‘bullet time’ that I did actually had a punk rock vibe.
something to prove
This one’s a bit of a self-talk song. Like so much of what I write, it’s about letting go of defense mechanisms, the fears that are getting in the way of what I want. It’s about the war inside, when the thing you have to do to get what you want is the thing you’re most afraid of. Afraid of failing at.
Charlotte Cardin so kindly came in to do back vocals on the chorus. About two minutes into her cutting the first harmony, I burst into tears. I think there are some words you can only truly hear through someone else’s voice.
I think the chorus needed that sweet, golden dimension that only Charlotte could bring.
microcosm
I feel like this song sets the stage, the transition, both sonically and lyrically, into ‘pale blue dot’ and ‘aerodynamics’. “Why can’t you be yourself, and why can’t you be a little more like everyone else?” is a bit the paradoxical message the world gives you as a kid. It feels like a Catch-22.
“Be yourself” … “ew, not like that”
I think my favorite line is “you’re looking at the world through a drinking straw, and they’re telling you that you gotta know who you are”. I just feel like, we’re all just a single point of consciousness, you know, experiencing the world from one very small, very specific point of view, but we act like everyone should know everything, should understand everything… And we see ourselves only through the reflection in the world around us, but the world around us is a funhouse mirror.
pale blue dot
“pale blue dot” is a photo of our planet, taken by a NASA space probe after it had been traveling away from us at 38,000 mph for 13 years straight. At 3.8 billion miles away, Voyager-1 had long left the solar system by the time it took this image of us in 1990. In it, the entire earth takes up less than a pixel. That uneasy, existential feeling you get when you look at that photo, that’s the same feeling I would get sometimes just looking up at the stars. And I don’t know why but I sort of find it comforting. It reminds me that no matter how big everything feels, there’s a point of view from which none of it matters.
“pale blue dot” was inspired by that feeling.
aerodynamics
The first verse is a true story. I really imagined strapping pieces of wood to my bike, and if I could shape them right, I’d create enough lift to take off. I didn’t think I could actually fly away—I understood once the wheels left the ground, I’d have no way of propelling myself forward, but I still thought it’d be worth trying, just to fly for a moment. I feel like it’s the kind of magical thinking only a kid could have.
But it’s also a song about wanting to escape. Maybe escaping into the imaginary was the best I had.
you know me
When I started piecing together this song, it was nothing but scattered thoughts and fragments of ideas. It wasn’t until I started crafting a second verse that the song’s true meaning started to emerge— and then that became the first verse.
One line in particular—”for Charlotte [Cardin] going plat[inum] I got a plaque, left it in the box, I don’t know what to do with that”—is actually true, it’s still in my closet. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely grateful…I guess that’s what this ‘dream & bass’ song is all about : riding the rollercoaster of highs and lows that comes with the constant pursuit of something greater, and finding contentment in the midst of it all.
just love
The production for the chorus came together in a day. The pitched vocals were actually an accident, but when I pitched them back down it became clear they needed to go back up. The next day I wrote that first verse and it was a lock from there.
I usually have to fight with my songs, work them, re-work them, tweak and tweak… this one just… happened. I honestly didn’t do much to it after those first two sessions—I was too afraid to fuck it up and lose the magic. I usually spend (waste??) a lot of time doubting and questioning everything, so it’s nice to have one I actually feel confident about every now and then.
turning blue
I wrote the chorus to ‘turning blue’ with Charlotte Cardin while working on her album, and it’s another one, like ‘bullet time’, that just didn’t end up making sense in the end for the sound that was emerging for her project.
I always loved it, so I took a shot at it in this drum and bass inspired sound that I had going. It’s a little bit of ‘trust issues’ sister track in my mind.
Fun fact, I don’t actually say “hot” in the line “do I really love you or do I just think you’re really fucking h-”. It gets cut off by the first “Oh” of the chorus. It’s kinda the only way I would actually let myself sing a line like that. By not actually singing it completely. But clearly it worked too well because everyone is convinced they can hear me saying “hot” lol.
trust issues
I really like playing with contrasts, and I feel like a common theme in my songs is this sort of duality between certainty and doubt. In ‘trust issues’, I’m talking about overthinking things and feeling like I’m either too much or not enough.
The sample that I used in the song repeats ‘YOU CAN’T STOP ME NOW!’ endlessly in the background, like some kind of mantra. I like the way that loop sometimes fights with the lead vocal for your attention… like competing emotions. I feel like what’s cool with this ‘dream and bass’ production is that friction of elements, that push and pull that keeps challenging you…And the feeling you get from it maybe mirrors that feeling of those two sides of the coin, fighting it out inside you.
something’s wrong with me (I think)
This one brewed for quite a while, took many shapes and sounds to get it to where it is. Some songs come together easily—others you really have to fight. This one was a fight. I love that arpeggiated piano line. Actually throughout the process, I loved, like really loved, just about every element of this track—the verses, the pre-chorus, the chorus, the piano, the production, etc. that’s why it was worth the fight.
This is another one where Charlotte blessed us with back vocals to add another dimension to the track.
crystal clear
I love when an album ends on a pivot. Funny enough this is one of the very first songs I wrote for this album, and one of the very last that I finished. The entire second half didn’t even exist until the entire album was done, which is cool.
I really love the production on this one. It’s that kind of thing where after you do it you try to “do it again”, to chase that thread, but it’s never quite right, and you wonder how you did it at all. The chords were inspired by Rosalía’s ‘COMO UN G’, which I was obsessed with.
And somehow I feel like I found that thread again at the end, to complete the track, producing the second half. I love it just as much.
Also the rest of the album has been so structured. This is surely my most “accessible” project, for however wild it still is… so anyway it was fun to throw a track in there that kinda does whatever it wants. A song built on pure intuition.
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Photo Credit: Aime-Elle
