Reuben Bullock wants to give people new ways of opening up their hearts and their minds. The vocalist/guitarist of the Calgary alt-rock band Reuben and the Dark is touring his latest album, un | love, and doing things a little bit differently this time around.
The album—Bullock’s third studio release—came to fruition while he was on vacation in Mexico, taking time to relax from life on the road. Bullock felt the spark of creativity and began writing. The album wholly captures the essence of each of the spaces it was created in. Bullock and his band started recording demos in a small cabin in the jungle, playing next to open doors and windows. Some aspects of the ambient textures of the surrounding wilderness can be heard on each track. After polishing the songs in what he calls a “fancy” studio in Montreal, Bullock decided to finish the vocals in a friend’s apartment bedroom. This brought the project full circle, creating a wholeness to the soundscape much greater than the sum of its parts.
“You don’t know when a good time to make something is, it just kind of happens,” says Bullock. “I just started writing and writing, so I called a couple of the guys in the band and they came out [to the cabin] and we just jumped in. I wasn’t planning on making another album for a year or two, but when it’s time, you gotta do it when you feel inspired.”
Having written hundreds of songs in his career, Bullock believes the measure of a good song comes from feeling the immediate urge to share it with somebody.
“It may sound strange, but if I sing something and I get goosebumps myself, that’s when I know I’m on to something good. If it can affect me like that when I’m doing it, then I know it’s going to affect other people,” says Bullock. “That’s how this whole record came about—all the songs on it are ones that really got me going one way or another. I didn’t overthink this album at all; this album all came straight from the heart.”
Bullock says that he’s at a point now where he understands that everything he says makes him vulnerable in one way or another. Through the act of weaving personal stories into song, he has found a healthy way to disassociate from his art; by sharing them, they belong to everybody.
“I can’t go up onstage night after night and say these personal, vulnerable things and be affected by how everyone is looking at me; you’d feel naked, like someone reading your journal,” he says. “Something happens at a certain stage along the way where I start calling it a song and no longer a bleeding-heart confession, and the brutal personal details that are in there, they become story and they become song, and that’s how I step back. Once they’re written, they belong to everybody.”
Currently on what he calls a “whirlwind” of a cross-Canada tour, Bullock wants to cultivate a feeling of opening and of bringing people closer together. Throughout the tour, Bullock and his band are actively working to bridge gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. They are making stops in high schools across the country and using music as a platform to engage in open conversation.
“The more I travel the country, the more I meet people, it’s become super important to me to be having those conversations and seeing what I can do to become a part of that healing, whatever that may be,” says Bullock. “I’ve realized that music has this way of bridging gaps.”
Reuben and the Dark
8 pm Wednesday, March 4
$18.50 (includes digital copy of un | love), Capital Ballroom
thecapitalballroom.com