Any number of tracks from Stewart Legere’s 2017 album, Quiet The Station, might have stood out as singles. The entire album was full of hits. From its gentler swaying tracks that showed off Legere’s prowess as a songwriter to the infectious low-key dance-inducer “Please Say,” there were no shortage of highlights that made it one of our favourite albums of the year. “Carry the River,” however, grew from a story that Legere felt needed to be told, and he did it his way: with a self-produced music video and a big black cape.
The song itself grew out of the events of July 19, 2005 when two Iranian teenagers, Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari, were hanged in the Iranian city of Mashhad for being gay and accused of raping a 13-year old boy. The two boys were abused, beaten and lashed for months before their executions.
The event left a lasting impression on Legere.
“I was 22 at the time, newly married (to a man) and kind of just embarking on my career as an artist,” says Legere. “I was writing a play with a friend of mine, called A Rescue Demonstration. It was this magic realism/surreal queer play about two queer first responders who meet at the scene of an accident and find out they’ve somehow met before in another life and had a child together.
“Doing research during the creation of that show, I read the story of those Iranian teens and it really affected me. It was one of the first time I started to see the greater world outside of my own bubble. I started to see the oppression of my queer siblings all over the world and it woke me up.
“Those thoughts percolated and eventually I wrote this song. I can remember the day I wrote it. It was all improv, basically. I remember sitting at the piano and playing these simple chords that were so easy to improv over, and this story just coming out. Rivers play a big part in my storytelling for some reason – I resonate with the inherent metaphors of movement and change I guess – and this song about burden, and journey, and hope, and sadness and forgiveness… just kind of came out.”
Fast forward to 2018: The RT Collective, a queer micro-commissioning company specializng in works created on phones, asks Legere to produce a video for a series they were creating at the time.
The resulting video was shot entirely on Legere’s partner’s Google Pixel II. The video itself is deceptively sparse, but alludes to some heavy themes with Death taking a role at center stage.
“In the intervening years I had made a theatre show called “Let’s Not Beat Each Other To Death” which is based on a number of violent events against queer people, but is generally about the seeds of violence within us all, and personal responsibility, the need for compassion, etc.,” explains Legere. “I’ve toured it across the country and to the UK. So these themes of queerness and love and hate and death and dance and hope have been rattling around in my head for awhile.”
“So, I took the costume from my show, designed by the amazing Leesa Hamilton (a professor at NSCAD and frequent collaborator with theatre companies all over the country) and me and my partner James MacLean (a really spectacular writer and performer and filmmaker himself) went out and shot this video all across Halifax/Kji’Puktuk last summer.
“The idea was that Death escapes from the cemetery and wanders around the city like a regular person for a day, trying to stave off that loneliness. Kind of like that José Saramago novel ‘Death With Interruptions’. They just do a bunch of normal stuff, trying to escape that nagging sense of existential angst they feel… but never quite achieving it.”
Despite Death’s plodding attempts to escape his state of purgatory, there is a sense that the unmistakeable force behind it is synonymous with existence; the inevitability of ennui. However, the video culminates with a great unburdening, if only through self-manifestation and a gentle spin-cycle of the soul.
“There’s this very visceral release…the spinning… that was somehow for me such a natural extension of the need the character feels the whole way through…
“When I was improving at each site, in that beautiful long skirt, I just naturally spun and spun… there’s something inherently releasing about it – it feels a bit like a planet spinning on its axis – trying to fling off the detritus.
“Ultimately, we tried to be a bit cheeky and fun with the video, it’s very lo-fi, but I think it compliments the song in a way I’m proud of. It’s evocative of a feeling I think is very familiar. This solo journey we’re all on. This walk to the gate.”