As Foxes in Fiction, Brooklyn singer-songwriter Warren Hildebrand creates what he calls “genre healing pop.” After more than four years, he’s finally set to return with his latest album, Ontario Gothic, due out September 23rd via Orchid Tapes. The follow-up to 2010’s Swung From the Branches sees Hildebrand continuing to use his brand of reflective and airy dream-pop in order to overcome and work through a series of personal tragedies. In anticipation, he’s shared the record’s title track.
Much like lead single “Shadow’s Song”, “Ontario Gothic” is tender and touching, featuring lovely violin arrangements courtesy of Owen Pallet and the soft purr of pastel synths. According to Hildebrand, it’s about a dear friend who passed away, a person he described as “one of the most remarkable, open and truly good people I’ve ever known, really.” Listen in below.
Hildebrand describes the track’s backstory at length in an accompanying note:
Musicially, “Ontario Gothic” begins where the previous song on the album, “Shadow’s Song” lets off. The the same melody – made from cutting up & copying and pasting singular guitar notes forms the melodic basis for the majority former. The instrumental elements of the middle / transition section make up the Foxes in Fiction song “Breathing In” found on the first Angeltown compilation. And like “Shadow’s Song” it features violin arrangements by Owen Pallett.
Lyrically, “Ontario Gothic” is written about a close friend name Cait who died in 2010 and to whom the album is dedicated. Cait was one of the closest friends that I had for many years when I was a bit younger. She and I became really close after I had moved back to my hometown in the suburbs of Toronto, away from a farm in rural Ontario that my family lived on from 2001 until 2004. I was coming away from what was the worst and most emotionally tumultuous period of my life at that point and I carried a lot of fucked up anxiety and deep sadness about my life and myself as a person. But more than anything else, getting to know, open up to and spend time with Cait during those first years helped open me up to kinds of happiness and a love for life that I didn’t think was within the realm of possibility at that point in my life.
She was one of the most remarkable, open and truly good people I’ve ever known, really. The song “Flashing Lights Have Ended Now” was also written about her just a point where we’re drifting apart; a year later she was gone. I wrote this song to crystallize the better parts of our friendship and to remember the healing effect that she had on me as a person which without I would not be the same person or have the same acceptance for life that I do now. I miss her enormously and I feel her influence and presence constantly.
Ontario Gothic Tracklist:
01. March 2011
02. Into The Fields
03. Glow (v079)
04. Shadow’s Song
05. Ontario Gothic
06. Amanda
07. Altars
