Buck 65 Recorded an Album to Cope with His Divorce

On September 30, Buck 65 will present his first album in three years, his sixth release on Warner, and his most vulnerable work of art to date: it's unlike anything you've seen or heard from Rich Terfry before. The Halifax-born, Toronto-based "hip hop honky" gets dark as hell on Neverlove, a divorce record for divorce records that falls somewhere between Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Eminem's "Kim."

Host of CBC Radio 2's Drive, Terfry’s 13-track album was largely influenced by his months living in Europe while recovering from the end of his marriage, what he describes as the darkest time of his life. After a debilitating heartbreak, Buck 65 brings you an album that is partly therapeutic and deeply affecting; he hopes he never has to make another album like it. He starts a Canada tour in November.

Noisey: Congratulations on Neverlove. It sounds really good, honestly. I really like it. But I got quite sad listening to it. It's a very sad album and even quite troubling at times.
Buck 65: Actually, I sat and listened to it last night from beginning to end for the first time in a long time, because a friend had asked to hear it. It was a girl from Nova Scotia, in fact!

Represent!
Yeah, yeah! But to be honest with you, I was actively avoiding listening to it because some of the songs are so heavy! And so I was reminded that the album is a bit of a doozy! (laughs) But what can I say? It was written during a very heavy time, but it really helped me a lot.

I read that you said making the album was a very cathartic process.
On certain days, I'd be feeling so shitty, I could hardly get out of bed. So I started channeling how I was feeling into some songs. I felt like I owed it to myself in some way, you know? I was going through something so big and I had to do something with it. I didn't want to have just this negative chunk of my life; I realized that something good has to come out of this, so I forced myself to write.

Was that a difficult thing to do?
Yeah, I really didn’t want to, to be honest. When you're going through that, you kind of don't want to do anything. Mostly I wanted to lie down all day long. But I'd do it. I'd make myself and then the next day I'd listen to what I'd done, and it was like, 'That actually feels great that I got something done.' The songs are really hard to hear, but they make me feel good, because I have a feeling that this album might affect people when they hear it. And that's what you want to do. It sounds pretentious to say this is art but that's what artists want to do when they're making art. So if nothing else, Neverlove is effective.

It's interesting to document that whole experience as an act of catharsis. But when you go on tour, you'll be playing these songs over and over again and I wonder if you'll be reliving that experience? Do you expect your relationship to these songs will change over time?
That's a really good question and that's a thing that's been on my mind a lot. First of all, as soon as the album was done, it hit me that I'll have to be accountable for this. I'm going to have to answer questions about this stuff and that's going to be weird, and then I'll have to perform this stuff live, and I'll be really vulnerable when I do that. So I've been sitting on this record for quite a while. I started working on the songs about 3 years ago, but going through that tough time, I feel it's behind me by a good stretch at this point. I'm in a good place now, but it's a bit of a task, as well. It's a little bit of a Pandora's Box that I've created and I'll have to deal with it myself, and it's been on my mind a lot. I'm bracing myself for that now. I think I'll figure it out as it goes, but there are probably a few songs on the album that I probably won't perform live, ever. I just think it'd be too much, and you know, I'm at a level in my career, well, I play in bars. So to imagine myself in a bar or club on a Friday night, that's the last place anyone wants to hear a song like "Baby Blanket" (laughs). It just doesn't seem like the time or place for those ones. I'd like for people to have their own quiet moments with those darker songs like I did when I made them.

There’s a stylistic change on Neverlove in the emphasis on female vocals. Nine of the thirteen tracks feature female-sung choruses and hooks. Even on a solo-Buck song, like “Danger & Play,” there’s a scene about Hamlet’s Ophelia, this figure of female hysteria and heartbreak.
From the beginning, there were things I wanted to evoke, in a big-picture sense, on this record. One was a feeling that I wanted to give people, which was … I don't know, it comes out in the production choices I made: I wanted to make it cold. I wanted a cold-feeling record, so there are the drum machines and synths, and there's not a lot of emphasis on analog instruments. There's a lot of empty space. I think that's achieved on a song like "Baby Blanket," which really feels like a big empty room with a lot of negative space around it. So I wanted to do that but I also wanted to maintain the presence of a woman in one way or another on pretty much every song, because, just in a basic sense, this is a divorce record. It's always the story of a man or a woman, or a man and the absence of woman. You can't have the discussion without both. So, yes, in one way or another, it's an important part of every song.

But even among those darker, cold songs, there are a few, um, club jams? [laughs]. I know you've spent a lot of time in Europe. Were you influenced by the European dance scene?
Yeah, I would say so. There's definitely a lot of European influence on the record. That's partly from the time I spent living there and the friends I made living there and in my travels. A lot of the work I did on this record was made with two friends of mine from Sweden and their whole musical sensibility is decidedly Swedish. When you think about a lot of the music that has come out of Sweden in the last few years, you see that people have a real knack for pop music but also really into the clubby and synth-y elements of pop music. These two friends I worked with absolutely, one hundred per cent come from that school. I was leaning on friends not just making this record, but the whole time going through the divorce, and I turned them loose and let them go for it. I thought, 'Let's do it, let's carry me through this thing.' And I also thought it was a good fit. I was looking for this cold thing and the production I was doing was very electronic-based and it was a good fit. Beyond that, the sound carries over from my previous album.

Yeah there's a lot of emphasis on melody in this context.
Melody has become a very important part of what I'm doing. I feel like you can only do so much with instruments. You can only do so much with lyrics. So really where I feel the album is most effective is what's conveyed with the melody. It's an area that is really important to me. Even if I wasn't doing the singing on the tracks, I was writing a lot of the melodies. And I felt like that those melodies are really going to bring home the messages of this record. On “Only War,” even just the melody of that chorus, even the voice that's singing it, it's all so heartbreaking. And that's the way I felt I had to go.

So, on a more personal note, to quote Cher, do you believe in life after love?
[laughs] The jury is still kind of out on that. That's where the title of the album comes from: Neverlove. When you go through something as tough as I did, in the divorce, in the first year of that, I was swearing all that off. I was saying I'd never take the chance and never feel this way again. That's not to say that I'm giving up on life. Even though, admittedly, there were some really dark days. Some days were as dark as it gets. I was pretty much on the brink. But having come through it, I feel like it made for a real shift of my priorities in life and a lot of things that were important before just aren't anymore, and that's where my feelings have really changed. And so, to be honest, three years later, there's still a lot I'm trying to figure out. Even on a daily basis, it's been tough for me. After my wife left, I tried to make another relationship work after about a year and a half, and it was really hard for the girl, and she had to move on, and it's been really tough for me to pick up and carry on. I just don't know if I have the guts to go down that road again. Having gone through something so tough, it scares me now. So that's what the title is all about. I mean, 'never' is a very strong word and I always reserve the right to change my mind, because anytime I ever felt I made my mind up about something, it's changed. But at this point, going forward, it's hard really hard to imagine. The last thing I can say on that topic is that I made a real firm decision to say, 'Okay, it's time to move on and get on with my life, and the way I’m going to do that and get through this is to make the next while all about me.' I'm not going to let the word 'selfish' carry negative connotations, and I'm not going to feel shitty for putting myself first for a while, at least until I'm ready to make new changes again, but for now it's all about me. I'm in a selfish mode, which feels good.

Thanks for being so honest, though a lot of that sentiment comes across on Neverlove. So much of the album is so personal, especially in regards to your ex-wife. There's also a lot of anger, aggression and almost vitriol in the lyrics and in the album's overall tone. Did you run it by her?
She was the first one to hear it! It was really important for me to play it for her. Our relationship is good now. It went through a period of being super sad and then I was angry for a while. I went through some therapy and the one thing they say is that anger is one of the stages of recovering from a traumatic sort of thing: you have to go through the anger. And a lot of it was directed at myself. And no doubt some of that went into the songs. But I will say the angriest songs didn't make it on the record. There were some downright mean ones that I hope never see the light of day. But I worked my way out of that. I'm a lot calmer now, even if I still haven't figured it all out. It felt necessary to get that crap out of me [laughs].

So is that how the album is structured, in those stages?
I feel like each of the steps is in there. Clearly there are some very sad songs, like “Superhero in My Heart” and “Baby Blanket.” And there are a couple of angry ones, like “Gates of Hell,” and especially ones that got left off (laughs). But eventually you wear yourself out from your own emotions, and you need a break from it all, so then there are ridiculous ones like “Super Pretty Naughty.” So the whole spectrum comes up on there and I hope that it works. I've lost perspective on the thing so I'll leave it up to everyone else to decide if it works as a record. Honestly, I'm terrified to see what people make of it.

Adria Young believes in life after love, after love, after love - @adriayoung