You get to enjoy the latest single from Calm Baretta not just once, but three times over. “The Rain” may have been a personal song for singer Josh Carter, but he’s let the producers have full rein with it, resulting in a triple release that includes remixes.
“‘The Rain’ is a relatively personal song to me,” says Calm Baretta’s Josh Carter. “I was kind of ruminating about a past relationship that went awry and affected me for quite some time, and this was kind of my letter to myself to understand what happened and to try and find stable ground again. I think everybody needs to find their own way to grieve and mend after an intense relationship.”
Collaborating with Adam Warren (waants, Glory Glory) and Calm Baretta’s bassist Nigel Haan (Deafpop), the band say that they wanted to go for a big release after a relatively quiet year.
They also took the opportunity to switch things up in the studio. Rather than going with their usual producer-of-choice, John Mullane (In-Flight Safety) the band chose to record at home in Prince Edward Island over the winter. Instead of travelling to Halifax, they moseyed down the street to work with Adam Gallant from the Hill Sound Studio.
“The Rain” builds on a pop theme that would be unsurprising in the hands of The Killers, but personalizes it by taking it in an abstract direction. Carter paints a dichotomy in two instances: one, the warm memories of a summer day and the second a damp, drizzly November of the soul.
In the words of Bill Withers, “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.”
“We wanted the remixes to be kind of polarizing,” says Carter, “One is very downtempo with almost a trap element and the other is very classic electronic.”
Haans, who has adopted the name Deafpop on account of being deaf in his right ear, says “I’ve always practiced producing my own electronic music, but have never really been able to pull together a finished polished sound. So, I decided to take a kick at the can by remixing one of our songs. We already had the stem tracks, so I just gave it a shot. The entire process pushed me to learn more about producing and after a decade of just messing around with my own music and style I was able to finally come out of the other side with a remixed version of our song ‘The Rain’.”
If music is an act of catharsis, it seems like Carter has found his way back to stable ground and then some. It doesn’t hurt that he managed it with a little help, and a couple of remixes, from his friends.