Sitting outside a Dartmouth coffee shop, Alexander Gallant looks fairly unassuming. A sweater over what’s suspected to be a button-up shirt. Medium-length hair that sometimes flies in front of his face. Two drinks in hand. One potentially caffeinated. The other, some kind of soda.
At first glance, Gallant wouldn’t strike the average Joe as royalty; yet, his newest album will see him take a throne that many of us didn’t even know existed.
The Prince of Birchy Head is Gallant’s third full-length project, dropping on June 19. A musician with a penchant for the acoustic guitar and folk songwriting, he’s lived quite the life: first as a rock musician in Toronto and now as a settled-down, straight-laced folk artist in the Dartmouth area.
His music has a mix of folk staples. Narratives that detail either his own exploits or experiences or ones he’s imagined. Even the realities he’s conjured have some sort of bearing on his life, usually. He’s not pushy. He’s not overly sentimental. He’s perfectly balanced, with just enough humour and the occasional dash of melancholy.
The new record, which he says was crafted in Dartmouth’s Fang Studios using a “beat up old shitty tape from the 80s”, has a similar tone and style to his last two outings. While Gallant says he’s looking forward to moving on to some grander projects, maybe introducing a few more instruments into the mix, there’s something special about listening to this storyteller delve into a narrative with his relaxed melodic voice and fingerpicked guitar.
As quickly as this release comes after Gallant’s last album, Rubber Monster Suit, the songwriter says it feels like many of those songs are from another lifetime: tracks that took shape when he was in the midst of getting sober, remnants from the pandemic-era that, while emotionally resonant, do not necessarily reflect his life as it is now.
“I had a wave of creativity that I hadn’t had since I was in my early twenties, probably,” says Gallant of that time. “You don’t want to hang onto things too long. I don’t, anyway. Like, they’ll be about relationships that were three relationships ago. Sometimes, I had moved on already. I don’t need to process those emotions anymore.”
For most of the tracks on The Prince of Birchy Head, Gallant is focused on the now. Current relationships, struggles, and feelings, all cast with his signature charm, wit, and fingerpicking.
Gallant is neither a proverbial voice nor a fountain of sorrow. That was never his style of folk. His songs have always been vignettes of lives he’s lived or tales he’s conceived to convey a certain emotion. As much as he would like to do more politically with his music—maybe become the next person to write a not-so-subtle ballad for peace on the level of John Lennon’s “Imagine”—Gallant can’t write something that isn’t true to himself. He wishes things were better, certainly, but what he knows is what he experiences, whether it’s joyful, sombre, or a little bit funny.
Instead, Gallant fuses his politics with experience. It’s essential to some of his storytelling, but it’s rarely a call to action.
He’s conflicted about his position as a folk songwriter with strong political beliefs. Still, as he acknowledges, the presence of joy in his music is itself a political statement, one that pushes back against suffering.
“The existence of other people that I can observe through my phone is so bad that I can’t allow myself any grace or laughter or joy in your life, which is crazy, because that’s what those people want,” says Gallant. “A free and normal life that isn’t, you know, full of violence and oppression… There’s no point in wallowing without action.
“You have to allow yourself to be happy when you can,” he continues, “because a lot of factors in life are trying to make it so you aren’t.”
As Gallant admits, he’s an anxious person. Like many of us, he dislikes the direction our world is going in, one ruled by social media algorithms that force musicians to become influencers. A world that doesn’t require face-to-face interactions to be a part of a music scene—go to shows, buy CDs and merch, interact with fellow fans—but one based almost entirely on arbitrary streaming numbers and the insurmountable playlist culture we’ve found ourselves in.
While Gallant reluctantly engages in these practices—as every artist these days has to—he does so lightheartedly. His Instagram videos are often comedic ramblings. His songs are stripped-back acoustic folk jams and ballads with a 1960s-era feel. He’s the coffeehouse singer-songwriter before that became a trend to dunk on in TikTok comments sections.
He’s also been pushing back against the appification of art through a vinyl release for his new album and an intimate concert at The Sanctuary Arts Centre in Dartmouth featuring Andrea Cormier on June 26.
All in all, Gallant is genuine. What better trait is there for the acclaimed Prince of Birchy Head?
