AA Wallace is a man of many hats. Or possibly a chameleon of many hats or even a mercurial shapeshifter. In which case, the hat is entirely superfluous. It’s impossible to pin him down to one genre, or even a single project. Just when we think he’s settled into something, he’s pulled the rug out from under us and launched something new or, in this case, doubled back on himself.
Wallace’s latest single, “Makes Me Wanna Die” has him reviving his Cheval moniker for the first time in nearly two decades.
Over the years, we’ve gotten to know AA Wallace’s solo French house-inspired eponymous nu-disco project, and as part of his long-running guitars-a’blazin’ band, Sleepless Nights, but for Cheval, we’d need a time machine. This was his fisherman-turned-musician “old dude with a guitar thing” that Wallace adopted when he first arrived in Halifax’s music scene in the late ’90s.
The decision to revisit Cheval came about as Wallace rushed through work on other projects, and waiting for the other pieces to catch up gave him the opportunity to circle back around. It was at the suggestion of semi-regular bandmate Trevor Murphy (Sluice, Dance Movie) that Wallace take a crack at a French song.
Oddly enough, the result was that the release’s B-Side came first; a cover of “Cool When Yer Old” by fellow Acadian artist P’tit Belliveau.
“I thought instead of writing one why don’t I just do my take on one that I already like,” explains Wallace. “I really like covers when the coverer makes the cover sound more like the coverer than the coveree. So, I recorded the Cheval take on that P’tit Belliveau jam.”
“Makes Me Wanna Die” is a very different kind of story, one that better reflects the often sardonic Wallace, who says the single came about after trolling a toxic positivity music meme site on Facebook.
“My friend Jesse Dangerously, who is a very successful world-famous rapper, commented that one of them ‘makes me wanna die,’ but I hardly notice that feeling anymore,” says Wallace. “So, there’s that. I gave him credit for it. he’s got great words. Most of the things I make into songs are things other people have said that to them seemed innocuous at the time.
“Since I had a whole album written and being put together I decided to not stop writing and have been writing a least a few songs a week. I sent them to Trevor [Murphy] and Josh [Pothier] in a chat because I like having an audience for that kind of thing.
“Somehow, I missed that they thought I should do ‘Makes Me Wanna Die’ as the song on the advance single. I realized that on the day I was supposed to deliver it so I recorded the whole thing on my lunch break. It’s a bit less produced than I would normally do but it suits the song.”
These two singles are just the build-up to Cheval’s forthcoming full-length album due out later this year, boasting some seriously heavy hitters, including Loel Campbell (Wintersleep), Joel Plaskett, Nils Edenloff (Rural Alberta Advantage), and Thomas Moffett.
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