Salt

When the fog of COVID lockdowns began to dissipate in 2021, Half Moon Run reemerged a changed band—though, in their case, that change brought the Montreal indie-folk explorers back to a familiar place. With the amicable departure of multi-instrumentalist Isaac Symonds, Half Moon Run were once again back down to the core trio—Devon Portielje, Dylan Phillips, and Conner Molander—that initially formed the band in 2009. The sense of déjà vu didn’t end there: To get their fourth album, Salt, off the ground, Half Moon Run dug through their decade-deep archive of more than 3000 studio recordings to salvage and revamp the rough sketches and half-finished songs that never made it past the finish line. “We had maybe 50 to 80 demos that we started this process with,” Portielje tells Apple Music. “We had hit so many walls with them. But eventually, we were able to get through them this time.” And for that, Portielje credits producer Connor Seidel, who provided a crucial outsider perspective on what aspects of a certain song worked and what extra elements were needed to push the boulder over the hill. But if Salt’s foundation is rooted in the past, the album also opens up new frontiers, as it augments Half Moon Run’s typically artful acoustic arrangements with funky piano grooves, tricky time signatures, and topical lyrics that speak to the precarious current condition of the world. Here, Portielje provides his track-by-track guide to how Salt shakes out.

“You Can Let Go”
“I had this very bare-bones demo that was me doing fast gibberish. We got the verses going, and we were really cooking musically. But then I thought, ‘Oh, my god—I have so much work to do,’ because the vocal delivery was so fast that I had a lot of lyrics to write. The first verse was actually recorded on my laptop microphone in the hallway, just when I was recording ideas, and the tone of it was cool, so we just kept it. I love internal rhymes, and I just wanted to follow this train of thought. If you follow a rhyme scheme, you can go down really interesting paths that you didn’t expect.”

“Alco”
“This song presents two sides of a challenging relationship with an ex-business partner that we had long ago. The song came out of 2012—I came back from a trip in Thailand with this riff on the ukulele, and we were in Australia trying to record it. We even brought in a horn section, and something didn’t work, and I couldn’t finish the lyrics. And during that time, we were having this really tumultuous period with an ex-business partner. There was a lot of industry pressure on us to be a certain way or do certain things that were in conflict to what was in our best interests, in terms of our psychological and physical health.”

“Hotel in Memphis”
“I’ve actually never even been to Memphis. But it could be anywhere. When we’re jamming, I start singing gibberish and then eventually out of the ether, I’ll say some word or phrase, and in this case, it was ‘hotel in Memphis,’ and I thought that was kind of catchy and cool. And then that base gives you your theme, and you can then build the song lyrically around that. It’s funny—you could almost layer ‘Still D.R.E.’ over this track. We love subverting the conventions a little bit.”

“Everyone’s Moving Out East”
“A lot of people I know moved to the Laurentians from Montreal [during the pandemic]. I even heard about a band that went way out to Gaspé—like, the middle of nowhere—because you can get oceanfront property for $150,000…though you’re a nine-hour drive from the nearest airport. But just like Memphis, East can be anywhere. When I was playing these chords, there was this intersection of beauty and sadness and wistfulness and yearning—like, ‘I want to go too,’ or ‘don’t leave me,’ or ‘I’m happy for you, but I’m sad that you’re going away.’ I was just trying to capture that feeling, which is really hard to capture.”

“9beat”
“The first big hurdle with this song was the 9/8 time signature, which is extremely uncommon. It’s hard to make it feel like you’re not just being an annoying prog-rock band. It took us a long time to get to a place where that felt natural. The second hurdle was figuring out the arrangement of the parts. We had to have the right amount of patience with the right amount of movement to not make it boring, and that just takes iteration after iteration. Hence, we had 104 recordings of this song. But Connor was able to say, ‘This kind of arrangement makes the most sense.’ And then you go with that and flesh it out.”

“Dodge the Rubble”
“The way that this song sounds is very much 2012 Half Moon Run—this was the first song where Dylan brought a synthesizer and put it on top of his drum kit and played drums and keys at the same time. And we were like, ‘Woah! Nobody’s doing this!’ Then we kind of got bored of that, but this song came back—we thought, ‘There’s a lot of depth here, and it seems to be a cohesive, well-structured song.’ When you’re in your twenties, there’s a certain naivete that you bring to songwriting that maybe seems more charming later on—you look back more kindly upon it.”

“Heartbeat”
“There’s something in this song that kind of reminds me of [Bruce Springsteen’s] ‘I’m On Fire’ or ‘Dancing in the Dark.’ Again, here we have that intersection of beauty and sadness that I’m trying to capture. It’s a bit abstract—I don’t know if it’s about a daughter or a lover—there’s just this kind of ethereal feminine force that I’m yearning for or missing.”

“Gigafire”
“In 2020, I read an article that basically coined this new term ‘gigafire.’ It was the first time in modern history that a single fire spanning more than a million square hectares was raging [in California]. And I thought it was like a pretty disheartening milestone to be on this Earth for. There was one [gigafire], and then there was many, and now there’s been tons. The destruction seemed symbolic of where we’re at in the world, and yet it only seemed to ratchet up the alarm slightly. And so, I kind of embraced that nihilist, destruction-prone sentiment to some degree.”

“Goodbye Cali”
“Recently, there’s been kind of an exodus out of California to some degree. The high-net-worth people are leaving. And [during the pandemic], we weren’t sure if we’d ever go back to these places as a band. So, maybe ‘Goodbye Cali’ is saying goodbye to a concept: California is the epicenter of Western culture, globally, and sometimes it feels like maybe it’s in the twilight of its age.”

“Salt”
“I remember playing this song on tour in 2012, without completed lyrics. The phrase ‘salt of the earth’ came to me out of the blue. I looked it up, and it turns out it’s from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It’s referring to good, essential people. But there’s a lot of riddles in that sermon. If you think about what salt is, it’s this essential crystal—it’s essential in food, and it’s essential in the building blocks of life. And it’s what you get when you boil down ocean water, which is kind of the way that our process went metaphorically for this record: We had all this material, and we boiled it down to these essential songs.”

“Crawl Back In”
“We recorded this in Istanbul, Türkiye, so you can hear some of the sounds of the city. But there’s also jungle audio layered in that I recorded in a jungle somewhere while on a spiritual journey. I love to sit in the ambiguity between two. The way this song feels is so homey and inviting; the melody just feels like it’s bringing me home. But I’m also accepting defeat by going home: You’re going back to the place that you know you shouldn’t go to, but that’s your destiny. And that’s very sad—but there’s something right about it, too. Again, it’s about beauty and sadness—I keep trying to capture that.”