Isaac Marr adds his name to the list of musicians who, over the course of the last two years, having found themselves at the receiving end of a global, industry-shifting curveball, took matters into his own hands. He has released a pair of singles—”Funeral” and “Inheritance”—that have been crafted in the depths of a lockdown, both produced and mixed by bandmate AJ Boutilier (Ursa Bright, Designosaur, Book Buddies).
Unsurprisingly, as can be guessed from their titles, these depths are pretty dark.
“I started writing music under my own name during the first lockdown of the pandemic,” says Marr, who usually performs as the guitarist and vocalist for Halifax-based rock-trio Ursa Bright. “Like every other band at the time, Ursa Bright wasn’t able to meet up to work on new material, so I needed a different outlet.”
And so, in that void, Marr’s upcoming album, In Effigy, emerged. The album immediately finds its tone in the opening track, “Funeral.” It’d be short and sweet, if only it were sweet. Rather, it’s endearingly melancholic and pulls the bandaid off on the album’s subject matter right out of the gate: for all the soft edges on this single, it is blunt in terms of raw emotional impact.
“[Funeral] sets up some of the recurring themes of loss, grief, and acceptance present throughout the rest of the album,” says Marr.
“Dearly departed, don’t go,
Hear the darling catharsis you wrought,
The things you’re most terrified of,
Happen whether you’re ready or not,
Hung up my funeral suit,
Newly imbued with your loss,
I didn’t know what to do,
So I never left the cemetery lawn”
In under a minute, it paints a tragic picture of someone paralyzed in the wake of death. Coincidently, it finds a lot of common ground with the Band of Horses’ single, the similarly titled “The Funeral“—but death comes to us all.
It also quickly launches us into the real matter at hand, the Jagger Lillington-directed video (assisted by local legends Jordan Haines and Alex Boyd) for “Inheritance” and the larger picture that Marr has crossed the breaking point for how much stress any human is supposed to endure.
“‘Inheritance’ was written about my experience with sleep paralysis a number of years ago,” explains Marr. “After a particularly grueling night shift, I came home and crashed hard. That afternoon I woke up unable to move any part of my body.”
Anyone who has experienced sleep paralysis (which can be caused by any manner of things, though stress seems to be a common factor), can tell you what a universally horrifying ordeal it is. Panicked and unable to move, it’s not uncommon to begin hallucinating as your brain attempts to reconcile with your senses. It’s given rise to the invention of terrors and daemons like Succubi and Incubi; mythical creatures who will crush the life from you in your sleep.
Marr’s experience with sleep paralysis is practically a textbook scenario.
“I don’t know if you have any personal experience with sleep paralysis, but it’s pretty terrifying,” says Marr. “It felt like I was someplace in between a dream state and consciousness. My whole body felt heavy like it was full of sand. Then, the real scary part. I saw a dark figure materialize in the corner of the room. It approached me and climbed up onto my chest. Although now I understand it was certainly a hallucination, the weight of it felt incredibly real.
“It’s hard to tell how long this was happening, but eventually, I gained control of my arms and legs again and was able to roll out of bed. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the following day it happened again, almost exactly the same way.
“I remembered my mom telling me a story about how my dad experienced something very similar in his youth. He would wake up paralyzed and see an ‘old hag’ in the room. Which is apparently recognized as a relatively common phenomenon now, but back then there was very little information available. So my mom was understandably concerned that my dad was possessed, or something supernatural was happening to him.”
“I found it hard to believe that both me and my dad having these experiences separately was a coincidence. I was pretty freaked out for a while, thinking that there might be a genetic component to sleep paralysis and that I had ‘inherited the curse’ from him. Thus, the name of the song.”
The video, impressively turned out given the circumstances of the last two years, with the bare minimum of special effects (read: a couple of light switches) captures the panic of Marr’s experience with poignant simplicity. It makes for a pinpoint story, but it is clearly the song about sleep paralysis we didn’t know we needed and a tidy bit of worldbuilding that is setting us up for Isaac Marr’s album as a whole.
“Luckily, it hasn’t happened to me since those two mornings in 2015,” adds Marr. “So, fingers crossed that’s the end of it.”