Ten years ago, if you already knew about the release of Rich Aucoin’s debut LP, We’re All Dying to Live, it was probably because you knew Rich Aucoin. Aucoin is first and foremost an entertainer: a living, walking, breathing party and his live shows, complete with confetti canons and coloured parachute, have become the stuff of legend. Long before his music was ever a twinkle in a jewel case, he was putting in the leg work—often quite literally—by travelling back and forth across the country. Now, it’s not unlikely that you or one of your friends know Rich personally, or at least have his phone number.
That perpetual party state of mind is what powers We’re All Dying to Live. It’s an electro-pop album that desperately teeters between a world of fun and a life of responsibility. A decade later, it’s clear what side of the equation Aucoin landed on, and in celebration of the album’s ten-year anniversary, we’re looking back to see if We’re All Dying to Live still brings the party.
Aucoin began recording We’re All Dying to Live in January 2008. At the time, the Halifax-based musician was still working at the Adidas store at the time. And rather than sticking to the trope of the dead-end job that everyone is dying to escape the moment they graduate (which, in turn, inspires the very award-winning album that allows them to do so), Aucoin says he rather enjoyed it.
In fact, Aucoin says that the nature of the work allowed him to focus more on his music career—it played the role of the classic slacker job in any coming-of-age story that allows that character to foster their dreams.
“What a job! I loved it. I would have kept working there if it didn’t get closed down,” laughs Aucoin. “I just liked the structure of working there. It was amazing at the beginning. Like, here are eight hours to book and work on music, and probably sell one pair of socks, and put mailers on, like, 200 envelopes for Dal employees.
“I think it helped at the beginning. Luckily, it didn’t close until the exact moment that I could afford to live off of music alone.”
Aucoin wouldn’t be the performer that we all know and We’re All Dying to Live wouldn’t be the pivotal album in his career if he’d spent all of his time manning the shop. Even this early in his career, Aucoin was already making waves as one of the country’s most exciting purveyors of parachute-themed parties. And so, with half the album recorded, Aucoin set off on tour across Canada in the summer of 2008.
Never one to shy away from audience participation, Aucoin used the occasion to workshop the album. Not only did he allow the audience members to help guide the process, but many would also come to be featured on it. With his MacBook and Mbox in tow, Aucoin says that he tracked nearly a hundred people while on tour. Once he returned, he recorded the voices of another two hundred people in his hometown, Halifax.
If there have been any major consistent themes in the production behind Aucoin’s albums, it’s that they are going to involve both travel and time. Release was famously delayed due to Rich’s laptop being stolen while in Costa Rica, the demands of United States necessitated that he take a lengthy trip across the entirety of the continent via bicycle, and, presumably, he spent a week travelling to the moon for Ephemeral but has been sworn to secrecy.
By the fall of 2009, his debut record was complete, but fans would still have to wait another two years before it was released, while it was mixed by David Wrench (David Byrne, Frank Ocean, Caribou, Goldfrapp) and mastered by Nilesh Patel. The prolonged wait, however, gave time for the album to percolate along with a few extra surprises Aucoin had prepared for its release.
Along with the album, Aucoin crafted a movie out of clips from 35 public domain films, syncing pictures with sounds, and adding even more flare to his already lively performances. And at the official release party at Halifax Pop Explosion in 2011, Aucoin was accompanied by an 80-person band, recreating the energy of the album and the sounds of hundreds of voices layered over top of each other.
Despite the elaborate production on what is integrally a crowd-pleaser of an album, Aucoin says that he feels that compared to his live shows, trying to find an audience for We’re All Dying to Live, and all the rest of his albums, has always been his biggest challenge.
“I put as much work into my records as my live shows and they’ve been received well by different publications over the years, but getting to the next level is always the hope,” explains Aucoin. “I was very green during the first record but I knew enough for tracking. recording and editing my first record was my music school. I knew what things I could do and what I couldn’t, so I’d always go into studios for various pieces; though basement drums slipped into all my records until Release.”
Although we may not have recognized it at the time, We’re All Dying to Live contains many of the hallmarks of a Rich Aucoin album. At its heart is a sentimental dance party, incorporating a lot of what made Canadian indie-pop great in the mid-to-late 2000s and making big, harmonious nods to the golden era of rock n’ roll.
With the album having been described as, among other things, “hi-fi lo-fi” and “an eclectic mix of genres sounding like a bit of everything,” it comes as no surprise that Aucoin cites a long list of diverse influences, including Sufjan Stevens, Flaming Lips, Stars, Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Besnard Lakes, Pink Floyd, Dan Deacon, Daft Punk, Justice, Crystal Castles, Terror Pigeon and Windom Earle.
None of Aucoin’s influences stand out more than through the obvious references to the sensitive orchestral-pop genius of the Beach Boys, albeit reinterpreted in synth format.“Even If All Your Friends Abandon You SMiLE” and “Brian Wilson is A.L.i.V.E. [All Living Instantly Vanquishing Everything]” shine with a gentle chorus of ooh’s and aah’s.
“Brian Wilson was always a big influence,” says Aucoin. “I was thinking of this record doing, [and thinking we’d] try everything like they did with Pet Sounds and having so many Wall of Sound sessions in the tracks.”
Regularly combining melodic synths and gang vocals, with the occasional drone of an organ, the album regularly finds its sweet spot between Arcade Fire and Justice. For nearly every track—and most of the album’s brief interludes—it’s easy to spot each tracking quickly pivoting from influence to influence. It’s a quickly paced smorgasbord unified through a sense that an audience is going to inevitably be experiencing this album live and Aucoin is their conductor. There’s an expectation that a crowd will be sweating to this and worked into a state of euphoria. Even the album’s lulls are just a temporary breather, a contrasting moment choreographed by Aucoin before they’re drawn into a frenzy beneath a parachute.
That dance between sentimentality and excitement perfectly embodies the message behind We’re All Dying to Live. What this album mainly expressed for Aucoin was exactly how it felt to be fresh out of school and trying his best to figure out his future.
“The album was about that period right after school and trying to figure out what you wanted to do with the rest of your life with your friends while playing shows to a couple of dozen folks at small bars and drinking tiny draft beer and hanging every other night and just making rent each month,” he says.
Now, ten years in, Aucoin says he is still not sick of the music on We’re All Dying to Live.
“I’m happy with the album. I still don’t know of any other album recorded like it. I think I luckily got some of the cringe stuff for me out in the first EP with some lyrical choices and a bad voice-over narration I made.
“The songs have all evolved so much since then that they all sound different now anyway. I went through phases where songs changed a bunch, but I think I’m back to preserving the best parts of them while updating their production to sound as thick as they can on sound systems.
“‘P.U.S.H.’ was all vocoder and eventually got a live vocal over it from people singing it at the end of the shows. We also kept adding synths. So there are like fifty synths on that track with each only coming in for four bars.”
The album would ultimately go on to be long-listed for a Polaris Prize in 2012, and the video for “Brian Wilson is A.L.i.V.E.”. with its single continuous shot of a Beach Boys-inspired fantasy, would win the Prism Prize in 2013. Aucoin’s video for “It”, directed by Noah Pink and comprised of reenacted scenes from blockbuster films, proved to be even more popular.
Compared to Aucoin’s more recent albums, We’re All Dying to Live stands out as one of the most lyrically dense. Since its release, his work has taken a turn for the more esoteric, particularly with Ephemeral and Release. United States, Aucoin’s most recent release, crafted in the turmoil of a nation on the brink of rather a lot of things, understandably takes on the tone of a protest album full of messages more suitable for chanting over sweeping arrangements.
And so, We’re All Dying to Live remains Aucoin’s most relateable work. It captures a moment right on the edge of life and approaches it with endearing compassion before flooring it with uplighting and relentless positivity in a way he never quite revisits. For that, and the confetti, and the parachute, we’ll keep coming back to We’re All Dying to Live again and again.
We’re All Dying to Live is still available for purchase in digital/cd format via bandcamp.com. If you want to see it released on vinyl, however, you might have to call him yourself.