![]() “But now there’s a lot of complicated feelings around just being around people again in general.”īut after many months of touring, he says, he understood, again, that it’s just something you have to cultivate. You’re waking up with a hangover on tour, and you have to play a show on the same day,” he says. Like, drinking always made things really complicated. He hoped touring while sober would be easier, but found that it was harder than he expected to be around people after so much isolation. In late 2021, Shauf returned to touring, making up a lot of the shows that had been canceled because of the pandemic. “If you are purely listening to it for the enjoyment of the music, you’re not gonna catch any of that.” In the end, I think if you listen closely, you’re gonna get pretty close to an understanding,” he says, though he was conscious of making something that could go down smoothly. “It’s a bit of a puzzle, but there’s still a lot of space in it where I don’t really spell out what happens. There’s the God perspective, there’s Norm, there’s another character,” he says. “There’s multiple perspectives to the story. Over time, Shauf’s ambitions for the record got a little larger when he quit drinking and also started thinking about unreliable narrators and religion. ![]() Shauf’s previous music focused on social interactions between people at bars and parties, so it makes sense that a change in the world’s circumstances would shift his songwriting approach. If you listen to it twice, it’s maybe about a stalker.” So, I wrote this song as a-if you listen to it once, you’re gonna think it’s about the phone. ![]() “When I wrote that song, I wrote it as a joke because I was in a relationship where I didn’t want to talk on the phone!” he says. He says “Telephone” was an early song on the album, and it started as a lark before the rest of the story formed around it. “If you listen to it casually, it’s a nice love song about someone who wants to talk on the telephone.” The second verse reveals that the narrator is already watching from the bushes outside of the house. “At first glance, it seems like this is just a normal person who has regular things going on in their life-misunderstandings and awkwardness and whatever-but if you listen closer to what’s happening in this story, there’s this bad thing happening,” he says, mentioning the song “Telephone” as an example. “I’m excited to just play them and be a little bit vulnerable, and see if my instrument’s working.” “These songs are hard, and I really try to push myself into a vocally uncomfortable place. In conversation, Shauf describes his personality as being “like the cat who hides under furniture,” and though a shy singer-songwriter can feel a bit like a contradiction, he clearly relishes the challenge of working through the music on stage. Over the course of a few idiosyncratic and intricate albums where he played nearly all of the instruments himself, Shauf has developed a reputation as Canada’s wry and downcast answer to Paul Simon, working his way from small clubs in Saskatchewan to grand theaters and festival stages. It’s one of those things that you have to keep coming back to, and feeling comfortable with just showing how the thing that you have works.” “You’re using your body as an instrument. Being, like, Oh, you missed that note,” he says in a bustling hotel lobby a few hours before the show. “I have a hard time with criticizing myself while I’m singing something. But being on stage still has an air of danger. The soft-spoken 35-year-old has been performing for audiences for most of his adult life, and they’ve been getting bigger ever since he was nominated for a handful of Juno Awards and the Polaris Music Prize and a song of his wound up on Barack Obama’s summer playlist in 2020. When Toronto-based musician Andy Shauf came to New York last month to play songs from his new album, Norm, which was released last week, he said he was working on his confidence.
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