Last week, Colin Buchanan was named the Producer of the Year at the 2021 Music PEI Awards, which should come as a surprise to no one. He’s turned out some top-notch award-winning albums for several east coast bands over the last couple of years, including KINLEY, Coyote, Quiet Parade, Logan Richard. He’s also performed as both member of the ECMA-winning and general pop champions Paper Lions, and the acclaimed shoegaze dream pop band Sorrey.
His solo work, however, usually has him nestled in behind someone else. Under the moniker of Good Neighbour, he’s released remixes of tunes from Sorrey and Braden Lam, but it wasn’t until now that we’ve seen him bring that to the forefront as a standalone project. As Good Neighbour, Buchanan has just released a debut single, “Little Know It All” that features rising star Logan Richard, and the indie-pop track goes out of its way to show off his production skills.
The irregularity of the project finds Buchanan picking away in his free time as a career producer. Rather than dialling things back going for a straight-forward no-nonsense approach, Buchanan pushes the envelope in a way that makes us wonder what Paper Lions would sound like with Colin left to his own devices.
A post-breakup tune, “Little Know It All” is about navigating new social landscapes in the vacuum left behind in the wake of the relationship. This path of self-discovery is paved with punchy beats and marked with instrumentation that defies any conventional concept of what a guitar was ever intended to be.
“‘Little Know It All’ was born out of a guitar loop I had been messing around with in Pro Tools. I wanted to see how far I could pitch shift certain instruments before they completely collapsed harmonically. I ended up really liking the tweaky guitar sound and basically built the whole progression from playing with a single pitched chord,” explains Buchanan of the process he used to craft the single.
“Logan (Richard) is a good pal of mine and I thought the vocal melody I was writing could really suit his voice. Admittedly, I think it was at the very top of his range but I was already in so deep with the production I couldn’t change the key. In the end, he just bore down and totally nailed it. The vocals have a certain visceral quality to them that might not be there had we lowered the key.”
And to be honest, this song would have been perfectly delicious even if it were just dripping with the warm fuzz on that guitar, but Buchanan—in his wisdom—has built “Little Know It All” with textural layers that blur the lines between melody and percussion. This hits hard in the pop vein right now, but it’d be nice to see Good Neighbour get weird, taken to an unnatural extreme and doled out at 2:00 AM.
Good Neighbour | SPOTIFY