The latest single from Rachel Cousins is a massive co-write with some of Newfoundland’s shining talents about the uncomfortable fallout of a relationship that is still managing to hold on, but just barely so. “Aftermath” is the tail end of a journey when things can’t be unsaid or undone and your happiness is forever tarnished.
Produced during Bell Canadian Songwriters Challenge hosted by MusicNL, “Aftermath” was co-written by Rachel Cousins, Kellie Loder, Brett Vey, Ian Crewe and Paige Penney and produced by Daniel Adams. The collective process may make for a rather generalized wounding, but it also speaks to the universality of the experience. Instead of any specific event, the song grew out of a few chords and the acknowledgement that we’ve all probably really put our foot in it at some point or another.
“It’s hard to say exactly what we were thinking when we wrote it but I know when we had some really pretty chord ideas we felt like a ballad was appropriate and we loved the idea of singing about a timeline of a relationship,” says Cousins.
“It’s up to the listener to decide what the aftermath is from. I think that lets it be more relatable to an audience; a fight, an event that stirred some emotions and changed things in the relationship.”
While the song has Cousin’s vocals front and center, they’ve doubled down on the metaphor of impending doom by backing the track with the ticking clock of a timebomb.
“I loved that Daniel had added the ticking sound to the production, either consciously or subconsciously, just because the concept of time was really cool to me in the song; time slipping away in a relationship that you wish you could pause and fix and then rewind, go back to the way things were before the aftermath,” says Cousins.