An interview with the Montreal band’s core members, Murray Lightburn and Natalia Yanchak, ahead of their album launch at Le National on Nov. 20.
by Dave MacIntyre
This article originally appeared in Cult MTL.
Murray Lightburn and Natalia Yanchak have always been ones to look for light and beauty amidst chaos. The Dears’ ninth studio album, Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful! — the title so nice they named it thrice — was released on Nov. 7. The Montreal mainstays’ first album in five years shows the band meditating on the human condition and the ups and downs of being alive, while doing so in their trademark anthemic fashion.
Unlike previous album cycles that were more protracted, this one came together quickly. Recording alongside Shae Brossard at Hotel2Tango, various musicians recorded their parts for 11 songs within two days. Horns and strings were added the following two days before Lightburn and Yanchak finished their parts.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused them to delay touring plans for the album’s predecessor, 2020’s Lovers Rock, and they didn’t get to make good on those plans until 2022. Once that was finished, both Lightburn and Yanchak moved on to other projects. Lightburn released a solo album, Once Upon a Time in Montreal, in 2023 and composed music for film and TV shows (including the documentary Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story), while Yanchak has been working in the video game industry for a small Montreal studio.
“I had a rough idea of songs like ‘Doom Pays,’ ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ and ‘Gotta Get My Head Right,’” says Lightburn. “Chipping away at them over the years, but just shelving. Series composing work is quite demanding, but it goes quickly. Whereas a movie is just on the edge of being an evergreen situation.
“That’s on your desk the entire time. You’re forced to think about it. You’re chipping away at that, as well. I’ve been doing a little of both of those things. The Jackie Shane documentary was in my life quite a bit for a long time. When that cascaded out, I was like, ‘Okay, there’s a small hole in my schedule for a month.’ I had to apply that discipline of having a deadline and delivery dates for other projects to the Dears.”
As such, Murray gave himself until the end of that month to write songs and finish the album, before allocating time to produce it that worked for them and their bandmates — guitarist Steve Raegele, bassist Rémi-Jean Leblanc and drummer Jeff Luciani — who all have endeavours outside of the Dears. They convened in the studio during March break, mastering the album by early April.
“That can only happen if you’re working in a way where your design is bulletproof,” he continues. “There’s no messing around. Anything I do goes through that same process of drafting, designing, writing, editing and knowing exactly what it is. When it’s time to press ‘go’ and render the project, you go into production and it’s very, very fast.”
The album’s title references a spontaneous moment during a show where the Dears played their album No Cities Left in full at the Rialto Theatre, in which Lightburn got the crowd to shout “life is beautiful” back at him three times during a speech between songs. “People these days are quite mired in the troubles of the world,” Lightburn explains. “We’re bombarded with this. It’s part of our algorithms.
“When I’m out in the world and interacting with people, my take is that the glass is half full, not half empty. If you just lived your entire life on the internet, you would think that everybody is angry all the time. It’s big business to be a rage farmer. The more we push back against darkness, the more light we will see and feel. This album is absolutely a manifestation of that.”
Life Is Beautiful!… opens with “Gotta Get My Head Right,” a song that had been sitting on the shelf since Lightburn started writing it shortly after he and Yanchak’s son, Apollo, was born in 2012. He’d struggled to finish it for a long time afterward, but something eventually clicked and the song was finally fleshed out.
“It was the song we were missing,” says Lightburn. He then turns to Yanchak: “Remember me saying, ‘We’re missing an opener?’ None of these songs are the opener. The opening song is critical. It’s your thesis statement. It has to have that opening song feeling that we’ve done. That song came to me like a lightning bolt. When that happened, it was done in a day.”
Given everything that has happened to the two in the years since that song began life — their son’s birth (as well as raising their first child, daughter Neptune), multiple albums, two solo albums for Lightburn, heavy touring — it feels serendipitous in the best way for “Gotta Get My Head Right” to come together so suddenly.
The single “Tears of a Nation,” meanwhile, is one that came together more laboriously, and quite literally so — Lightburn essentially compares that song’s process to childbirth. It also almost didn’t make the LP.
“To complete a song, you have an idea, a melody, you hammer out some kind of basic demo. I have tons of voice memos, but I’ll get going, and then I’ll hit a wall and be like, ‘I guess this isn’t going anywhere.’ You put it down, and at some point it pops back into your brain.
“The reason why it’s popping back into your brain is because the other part is coming. You don’t realize it. The writing process is so strange like that. You give up on something, you move on…”
“But it’s still in your subconscious,” Yanchak interjects. “It’s still brewing.”
“It’s kind of like being in labour for 24 hours.,” says Lightburn. “You start having contractions, you think it’s go time, you go to the hospital, you got your bag, you’re there, you’re waiting for this thing to come out. It’s not ready. They send you home.
“The thing is, you don’t see it that way, because that baby’s coming out, yeah? But you think it’s not coming out, like it’s dead. So you move on, you start working on another baby. It’s like, wait a second, this baby’s still coming out. You go back, you start having the contractions again, and it’s like, ‘Oh shit.’ That’s one of those songs where it’s like, ‘Time to go back to the hospital’ and boom, within 30 minutes, you can’t write fast enough.”
The Dears’ next Montreal show will take place on Nov. 20 at le National, with their daughter Neptune’s band Mellonella as one of the opening acts. Having met many of their fans at shows over the years, their process takes into account what certain songs will mean to certain people.
“That’s part of the DNA of our records now — our audience is a part of them,” says Lightburn. “We’ve had this really long relationship with them. They’re expecting a certain thing from us, and we work to deliver that. The day it falls completely flat and we can’t even scrape together 100 listeners on a new song, that’s the day when we’re going to hang up our skates. But if our fans still want the manna from heaven, we’re going to give it to them.” ■
The Dears play le National (1220 Ste-Catherine E.) with guests on Thursday, Nov. 20, 8 p.m., $48, all ages. This article was originally published in the November 2025 issue of Cult MTL.
Dave MacIntyre 