The bittersweet success of the Sadies' Colder Streams
Here's a shortlist shortcut to the band's Polaris-nominated debut album
The Sadies' Colder Streams is one of this year's 10 Polaris Music Prize-nominated albums, and CBC Music's Shortlist Shortcut series is back to help music fans find out the key details about the shortlisted record.
Dig into the stories behind the albums, the tracks you need to know, and the perfect summer activities to complement your listening. You can also listen to The Ten radio special on the album.
Artist:
The Sadies.
Album:
Colder Streams.
Polaris Music Prize history:
This is the Sadies' second shortlist nomination. The first was in 2010 for Darker Circles.
Story behind the nominated album:
Colder Streams was made between 2019 and 2021, overlapping largely with the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. This meant that the Sadies — a four-piece (Dallas Good, Travis Good, Sean Dean and Mike Belitsky) known for its legendary live shows and the magic the bandmates made together onstage — had to record many of their parts in solitude or in pairs. But that didn't diminish the Sadies' excitement about the record they were making. In 2021, Dallas even wrote a tongue-in-cheek "anti-bio" for the album that opened with: "Colder Streams is, by far, the best record that has ever been made by anyone. Ever."
What followed was devastating. After 25 years as a band, Colder Streams would be the last album the Sadies made together. Dallas Good died on Feb. 17, 2022. He was 48 years old.
Four months after Dallas's passing, the Sadies released Colder Streams, which poured from the deep waters of '60s garage and psychedelic rock, punk, surf rock, country, bluegrass, roots, Americana and folk traditions. Its subject matter was deliberately elegiac in places (a lament for the late Justin Townes Earle, and the tension of the global pandemic, seep through) but the album also served as an unintentional map as we learn to navigate grief in these times; that it is not something with stages that we move through, necessarily, but that we are carrying multiple griefs, ongoing griefs, and that we must hold them and honour them alongside our joy, pleasure, rage and sadness.
Most critics agreed that Dallas's anti-bio was at least partly right: it was the Sadies' best record. Not only had its producer, Richard Reed Parry, managed to finally capture the band's live energy in all its propulsive, masterful glory, but the Sadies themselves showed the power of sonic chaos when it is rooted in creative cohesion, a shared musicianship, and deep trust.
Notable players:
The album was produced by Parry and mixed and engineered by Pietro Amato. It also features a variety of collaborators including Jon Spencer, Mike Dubue, Margaret Good and Bruce Good.
Standout songs:
'More Alone'
Dallas wrote this song shortly after Justin Townes Earle died, and it's one of the most acutely affecting portraits of the complex relationship between addiction disease, the ongoing drug-poisoning crisis, pain and loneliness, and community and lack thereof. Wild explosions of guitar punctuate the rage and regret of loss" "We're all alone / we're all so alone / I feel more alone / than when I'm alone." Devastating seems like too small a word for all the people we've lost this way, and all the people left behind. This song conveys that beautifully.
'All the Good'
This is a dark song in a relatively happy body, and stunningly captures the tension of trying to hold on to hope when everything's trying to crush you. Verses like "I still have so much to learn/ because of the lessons I missed/ I appreciate all of your concern/ but I burned down every bridge" are set against a rambling, shuffle-happy arrangement rooted in a hopeful bit of Americana-rock-'n'-roll pep. It's the song that you might see someone dancing to in a bar at the very end of a long, long night: a little drunk, a little sad, but mostly content in the warm glow of a hangover that's six hours away. Someone who's maybe their own worst enemy but also has a lot of people rooting for them. Someone who can't see all the good. At least not yet, anyway.
Recommended if you like:
The Stranglers, the Doors, the Kinks.
Summer activity pairing:
The colder the stream, the clearer the water, right? I don't know if that's true, but it feels like it should be. I do know the comfort of deep clarity, the beauty of being able to see through to what is below. That is the sound of Colder Streams, so it's only fitting that we take this one outside and let the music and water wash away the dust, muss and fuss of the world.
Don't miss Shortlist Summer: a season-long showcase of the 10 albums shortlisted for the 2023 Polaris Music Prize. Read the weekly Polaris Shortlist Shortcut feature at cbcmusic.ca/polaris and tune into The Ten radio special every Sunday night at cbc.ca/listen.