Early in the conversation, Edmonton-based singer/songwriter Cayley Thomas didn’t believe there was an overall theme or solid narrative thread running through the five songs on her new EP, How Else Can I Tell You?, which was released in April on streaming platforms, download platforms and in limited numbers of physical copies.
Towards the end of the chat, both she and the author of this piece realized that there was indeed a very coherent, cogent and deeply meaningful thread running through the material. The songs themselves are a mirror to the real-life, real-time journey the multi-talented Thomas has been on as a solo artist over the past few years. They are songs of introspection and self-examination, culminating into a growing self-awareness and an increasing confidence in the powers of her own observation, her critical thinking, and her ability to better articulate what is going on in her head, heart and spirit through the vehicle of music.
How Else Can I Tell You? is the crystallization of this journey of self-exploration and how she has come out of a life-altering crucible, reconciling what has happened in her past with the woman and the artist she has become. And now that she has taken stock, the EP and this moment in her life, has become the launching point of even more rewarding and deeper self-examination, which will undoubtedly be chronicled in future musical endeavours.
It is an exceptional work of songcraft, with each song having its own unique soundscape and tone, all wrapped together by the binding power of Thomas’s compelling lyrics and dextrously emotive vocal performances.
The EP was recorded over much of 2019, at a variety of recording venues, including her own living room in Edmonton, with the assistance of audio engineers Nik Kozub and Steve Chahley.
“A song is so much about time and place. And that’s why I am realizing it’s so important for me to understand that perfectionism is the enemy of done. So, in order for me to bring something to completion in a time that still feels exciting enough for the listener and for you, I am really working to close that gap between when I start and when I finish. For me to be able to expedite my process is something I am definitely looking forward to,” she said.
“One intuitive thing that I was finally able to latch on to during this process was when it wasn’t right, when I wasn’t feeling it, I could trust my gut there. It took me a while to even be confident having those conversations about having the right people doing what I needed to be done for the EP. I struggled early on asking for what I wanted to help realize what I was imagining in my head. But I realize that right now, I am a singer first and foremost. The challenge is often creating a soundscape that compliments the way in which I’d like my voice to blend with everything. As a guitar player, I would love at some point to be a multi-instrumentalist, but I need to hire people to help me create my vision. I eventually worked through all that and am happy with how it all turned out in the end, even if it was stressful at times, because I felt sort of bashful that I was bringing in different people to do different things. It’s that self-berating thing where you beat yourself up for asking for help.”
While not a perfectionist per se, Thomas is meticulous in crafting her songs, and when deciding which ones to release on her EP, she was rigorous in ensuring they met a standard of quality and emotional impactfulness on which to continue to build her career as a singer/songwriter.
“I decided to go with these five songs; I see this body of work as five sort of separate sonic explorations. I arranged the instrumentation a little bit different for each one, so they weren’t necessarily created as an intentional unit. It wasn’t like an album where I sat down and said, okay I am now going to write this conceptual thing. I had some other songs that I was working on during this process, but they didn’t fit. By they time I was finished, those songs just weren’t something I was feeling super passionate about, so I whittled it down to the ones that I was truly proud of and felt like I could put out currently and still stand behind. There is a possibility of releasing a song or two after this EP and maybe release something bigger in the fall,” she said, explaining that the process was not only detailed and comprehensive, but at times emotionally draining.
“When I was first beginning, I was having a really hard time trusting my gut and making decisions and it was hard for me to act as my own critic. Whenever I have created a record before, it’s like a million different micro-decisions and you have to really home in on what you want. I think what I hope people will take away from this EP is that through the process of kind of slugging it out, I have got much better at trusting my own intuition and know what I want in a recording setting, which can be kind of tricky. For me, growth and evolution as an artist feels like anxiety and doubt sometimes. And through creating these five songs, it was a bit agonizing at times. But I feel like I have gone through a real fire and come out the other end to take all that stuff I learned and create some more work soon. We may say it’s only five songs, but it took quite a bit to get to the place where I am at now.”
“I am already feeling that it’s kind of a new beginning for me in some ways and that this EP is a sort of calling card about who I am as an artist. We talked about it as a reintroduction of a sort and I continue to inch closer to making the kind of art that I want to create. I know the kind of music that I like and its about how I can connect the dots from what I really like to what my skill set is to create something new, to kind of blend those two. I think every artist wants to create freedom for themselves so that they can move around and do different things. I may have said this already, but I feel I am getting closer to the kind of music that I strive to make. I was a kid in a candy store for a few times during creating this. It was like, ‘can I get someone to play vibraphone’, or just being willing to do things in a way that I have never really be able to explore before. I definitely do hope, with this EP, to create a sort of familiarity for the listener where they could kind of pick out, ‘oh, that’s a Cayley Thomas song.’ I think it’s about continuing to expand my body of work, because you have to keep giving people more things to absorb and want to keep coming back to.”
Thomas has been a performer most of her life, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting, but also working professionally in theatre and film since se was 13. Throughout her life, she also loved music, and many of her theatrical roles involved singing. At age 21, her family endured a traumatic loss, one that continues to reverberate through Cayley’s life, and compelled her to express herself through songwriting.
“I finished school at 21, it was around the same time that I started writing music. And that same year, the loss we had, kind of moved me over into creating my own work. I was a circumstance that either cracks you open, or it shuts a person down. And my family has become quite open to the conversation as a means to offer something up to the world. It’s the unthinkable and it’s really hard to talk about, but even my parents through the activism they are now involved with, live that death in many ways. I am creating this music, and it’s definitely not all about my brother Alex, but that’s where the process began,” she explained.
“He died by suicide when I was 21 and he was 24. He was a welder at the time and had gotten into a bit of a tricky situation with drug use. And I think he took on so much of the stigma of that and shame that he wasn’t able to bring himself to ask for help. He wasn’t able to, and basically that shame, in many ways, is what ended up killing him. So, when I spoke about activism, my mom in particular is very involved in working for things like decriminalization of drugs, for men’s mental health and fighting stigma and shame. There are so many things that men are socialized not to talk about, so my parents have moved on in a really graceful way to where they have chosen to talk about it. Nobody is ever really talking about this and it’s so f***ing hard to take that leap, so even in the title of this EP project, How Else Can I Tell You? it’s sort of about expressing that thing which is really difficult to articulate. It’s where people have secrecy, they also have shame, and it’s really for people to be comfortable in revealing those parts of themselves. And in my brother’s case, it was obviously something impossible for him to do, even though we all would have been so open to the conversation. But so many people just end up in a situation like that where a habit or a lifestyle they are dealing with has become too overpowering.
“Over the years, I have obviously written to him and about him in different ways, but the last song on this EP is called In A While. It’s sort of a present day letter to him. I have often found myself thinking about how he would respond to any given situation, even like the Covid-19 thing right now. It’s like what would Alex think about these large life events that he never got to live to experience. And then there’s also part of me that’s grieving the fact that the wholeness of my family identity can never be the same. We do amazingly, but we were a family of four and now there’s three of us. We all have our own relationship to that loss and how our relationship to each other has shifted also, so that’s where a lot of my art and my spirit and my inspiration lives.”
In A While truly is an exceptional piece of songwriting, even without the listener knowing and comprehending the context in which it has been written. It deftly traverses the rocky emotional ground of her deeply personal loss, but in a way that is neither maudlin nor excessively sentimental. It allows for the listener to inject their own scenarios and own sense of loss and life, yet you know that every note, every word, is infused with profound and sincere meaning.
“Although the intensity of what happened is not what it was eight years ago when Alex died, it’s still something that I am sure anyone who has experienced a profound loss knows is just with you all the time. So, the song is just sort of that. And it should feel kind of wistful because I feel like so often if someone dies in a tragic way, they’re kind of defined by that. And that’s sad in many ways. People will ask me if I have siblings and I will say yes, and then they ask me more and I tell them he died. And that’s the end of the conversation. With my close friends and family, I value that they will ask beyond that. They understand that it wasn’t his whole life, it was just the end of his life,” Thomas explained.
“The song is almost like a voicemail to the other side where I am saying, ‘hey, I just wanted to drop you a line.’ And for years I would. We still had a cell phone and it takes a while in the human experienced to catch up to a new reality, so I would call his phone, and I wouldn’t necessarily leave him voice mails, but it’s this idea of still being in a relationship with this person. I don’t have any other siblings. I don’t have anyone else I could share that DNA and that genetic makeup and also just share the history of our family. It is forever with me, and I am at peace with that. And I also want to continue to explore other parts of my identity through my music.”
The first two tracks on the EP, Midnight Hours and Two Minds are the most recent compositions, and are demonstrative of what Thomas has been talking about throughout this article – the desire to continue to push her artistry forward, and an increasing willingness to explore other aspects of herself, her life and her life experiences.
“Midnight Hours is kind of about the idea of how sometimes we’re forced to meet ourselves and reckon with ourselves. It again goes back to the How Else Can I Tell You? idea, and it’s where the midnight hour is kind of a self-destructive time of night, or it’s a time where you’re embracing solitude and quiet and are more reflective. And in Midnight Hours I was definitely reckoning with myself. Both it and Two Minds are sort of my calling cards moving forward because they are newer and because I do feel like I have taken a pretty big step forward in terms of my confidence as to what I want to write about down the road,” she explained.
“Beyond writing about Alex when I was younger, and I am still quite young [29] and I have experienced big things, but there wasn’t a ton of wisdom years ago where I felt I could really stand behind what I was writing. Midnight Hours is a song where I have a definite idea of the atmosphere that I wanted to create, and I think we did it quite effectively. It was the song where I decided to have someone play vibraphone, which helped create this dreamy sonic landscape.”
While Thomas still acts on stage and screen (she has toured nationally in a number of big shows, including Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where she played the titular female role) she is focusing more and more on her music and as she does, she continues to build her reputation as an artist of remarkable depth, authenticity, and skill.
For more information on Cayley Thomas, the new EP How Else Can I Tell You? and any post-Covid-19 pandemic tour dates, visit www.cayleythomas.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
