Jazzy, stylish, lovesick portrait

Once Upon a Time In Montreal is a lush, bittersweet, romantic song cycle in the quirky-classy pop tradition of artists like Burt Bacharach and Love. On the track “Reaching Out For Love” (“I’m reaching out for love and beyond,” he sings mystically), Lightburn declares, “My head is full of melody / I can’t seem to shake the tragedies of unreconciled relationships,” which, given the old-fashioned whimsy of the phrase, “My head is full of melody,” and the modern thoughtfulness of the descriptor “unreconciled,” captures the spirit of this work pretty well. 

Lightburn’s singing style and arrangements transport the listener back to the snazzy 60s. His delivery is robust and theatrical, qualities the lounge acts and sophisticated folk-rockers of the era exhibited in their own ways. His flights of passion are propelled by vibrato, and even his bitter irony is couched in baroque singsong, as on the topical “No New Deaths Today,” where he voices a tragically common plaint in fancy language: “Is this a turn of phrase with which I have to live?” While the elegant stylings Lightburn is fond of aren’t what passes for authenticity these days, he sounds sincere and self-aware underneath. Sometimes at the end of a line when the band is about to swing into an instrumental passage, he emits an enthusiastic little “Hoo!” Or he’ll insert a briskly off-theme phrase like “Let Jesus take the wheel” or “no more bullshit.” 

The instrumentation is fittingly grandiose. It’s crafty and tasteful, but maybe not everyone’s cup of tea. Torch songs draped in jazzy strings, horns and piano are schmaltzy by definition. Lightburn’s passion realizes its artistic potential in the medium of easy listening rather than being trivialized by it. There’s a warm sense of play from the “Wichita Lineman” quoting guitar solo, to the analog room noise that becomes audible when few instruments are playing, to the climactic and exuberant sax solo that ends the title track; a tender tale of a lost Quebecois love, whom the narrator once sold his horn to pursue.

As the name of the album implies, Lightburn has some stories to tell. He takes inspiration from his father, who passed away during the pandemic after developing Alzheimer’s. According to what Lightburn has explained elsewhere, about half of these songs are from the perspective of his father, a jazz musician who endured deep racism when he migrated to Montreal and showed his wife more love than he ever did his children. The narrative can’t exactly be parsed from the lyrics, only felt. This origin story explains the choice not to compose a straight ahead rock record. That wouldn’t have been accurate to the tone of his parent’s experiences. While Lightburn can’t connect to his departed loved one anymore, he can inhabit his memory: “I think I heard the radio play A Love Supreme, it’s John Coltrane. But still there is something amiss. It’s the warm and tender feeling of your kiss.” 

Once Upon A Time In Montreal is romantic in a way that sees heartbreak as transcendent, lavish yet personal and funny, an echo from the past that still reverberates in this haunted century.