City and Colour

In the post-hardcore group Alexisonfire, Dallas Green’s smooth, melodic singing offered a calming counterpoint to covocalist George Pettit’s throat-shredding screams. But in his solo project, City and Colour, he traded Alexisonfire’s turmoil for acoustic folk, making the most of his sweet, surprisingly gentle falsetto. Born in 1980 in Ontario, Canada, Green first went solo with 2005’s Sometimes, stripping down to just guitar and voice. The 2008 single “Sleeping Sickness,” featuring The Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie, confirmed Green’s entry into the Canadian singer/songwriter canon. After leaving Alexisonfire in 2010, he dipped into pedal steel and roots rock on 2011’s Little Hell, and leaned further into atmospheric Americana with 2013’s The Hurry and the Harm. Then, on 2015’s If I Should Go Before You, recorded with his touring band, City and Colour broke through to a fuller, more multidimensional sound by embracing fuzzy psychedelia, roadhouse blues, and dreamy pop-rock with traces of Jeff Buckley and Bon Iver. Four years later, A Pill for Loneliness sent Green’s starry-eyed melodies soaring into outer space, pushing the recording studio to its galactic limits in songs drenched in effects. Throughout all these shifts in style, however, Green’s songs have remained keenly focused on catharsis. “I tend to celebrate the negative or the dark parts of life in my music,” he told Apple Music. “When I’m feeling dark or I’m feeling those sad moments, that’s what I write about in order to get back to the light.”