Strong Words |Couture shares intense, intimate experiences on her latest album.
“I chose to say that I had lost my son. It was a very conscious decision,” explains Edmonton-born, Toronto-based singer/songwriter Christa Couture. “I really debated whether I was going to actually spell that out for people with this record. I mean, it’s vulnerable, and I was worried about how it would be handled by the press.”
I’ve caught her on her cell while she’s on the road to a gig in Montreal. She takes the time to find a place to pull over—which is good, as Couture has experienced enough adversity in her lifetime (including overcoming childhood cancer) without adding some highway incident to the list. As 18-wheelers thunder by, Couture gets distracted by the sound and loses her place in the long story of the creation of her latest album, The Wedding Singer & The Undertaker. It was a process that started before love and ended after loss, one that made Couture realize that not writing, for her, was not an option.
“When the album started to take shape was probably when I met Nick, my boyfriend, cause I started writing happy songs for the first time in my life,” says Couture with a laugh. “It’s amazing what love does to you. You write all these political songs and personal songs and angry songs and then it’s just like ‘La-la-la-la-la.’”
“La-la-la” led to an unexpected pregnancy, but Couture embraced the idea of motherhood, and shifted her priorities to figure out how she was going to integrate music into the new direction her life was taking. “When my son Emmett was born,” she saysm “He died after a really complicated labour where just everything went wrong and it was just too much for him. He didn’t survive it. He lived for a day on life support. He never opened his eyes. The first six months after that I don’t even remember—just a black hole.”
Apathy and grief took over, and it was a long time before Couture wrote anything new. However, she found she needed to write to save her sanity. When she finally picked up the pen again, she ended up with two divergent sets of songs—ones about the joy of new love and motherhood, the others about the sorrow of loss. (Couture’s father also died not long after her son.)
“So this phrase came to me: ‘the wedding singer and the undertaker,’” Couture says. “And I realized that my songs and my life in the last couple years were very much vacillating between those two spaces. Almost literally too: dealing with the deaths and also dealing with the positive side of things—seeing how related they are. I’m so glad that I had [my son]. I hate that he died. I hate it. But you have to open yourself up to things being hard if you going to open yourself up to the good stuff.”
Couture speaks with passion and emotion, but her voice remains steady—she never wavers or cuts out. Since life has that tendency to keep going, even after death, Couture insists on continuing to share her experiences, with the accompaniment of a spirited piano or a delicate guitar, of course.
“I’ve never regretted any of the stuff I’ve put on my album,” she says. “I mean, with [2005’s] Fell Out of Oz, I felt like I was exposing vulnerable experiences and after that album I thought, ‘Oh, my next album is going to be totally obscure and veiled.’ And then more intense shit happened, which is just built in me to express—though I guess that’s kinda exhibitionist. I’m just try to make sure I’m being aware of how I feel that day and, you know, if I’m feeling sensitive I won’t play the songs, sometimes.
“I thought I knew exactly what I’d be doing for the next years of my life and that was gone in a day. I suddenly had no idea what to do with myself. I had all of this energy and everything was switched on in me to be a mom and, I mean, I am a new mom—I just don’t have my baby anymore. So I had all this stuff that I needed to outpour and it just gave me a lot of focus, and gave me something to be committed to.”
