​LADY CHARLES

we absolutely love this

​In pop culture, a manic pixie dream girl is usually a dreamy, troubled girl whose sole purpose is to inspire a male character. Lady Charles takes this archetype and makes it a more gender-fluid and empowering one through their new single, "Manic Pixie Dream Boy."
 
The song begins with an 80's inspired guitar groove that brings to mind bands like Blondie in their "Autoamerican" era. Then, Lady Charles' sonorous vocals kick in as they casually sing about who they are and why other people shouldn't bring them down.
 
"To all those sideways glances
Quit harshing me!
'cause I'm a manic pixie dream boy
Trying to live authentically"
 
In fact, their vocals are strongly reminiscent of David Bowie, especially once the third verse comes in and they showcase their falsetto range. Yet, the second verse is also very Bowie-esque due to their witty wordplay as they jokingly refer to their depression and gender expression.
 
According to the artist themselves, the song was inspired by not only Bowie, but also the rock and roll ethos itself. "I always felt that rock music lends itself to androgyny because at its core I think rock music is a genre that cuts across identities and unites people. It doesn't matter one's sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, or age – if you feel it then you are rock and roll.”
 
Through the accompanying music video, Lady Charles proudly showcases their gender-fluidity and talent as they appear in various shots. One notable scene involves them performing as an entire rock band, taking on the role of vocalist, guitarist, and drummer all at once. Thus, "Manic Pixie Dream Boy" is about being confident and living for yourself, regardless of what others think.

​Lady Charles explains the song further as they state, "When I began working on ‘Manic Pixie Dream Boy’ something clicked. I found myself drawing from Hip Hop punchlines and weirdo indie rock, dropping the hyper-serious statement writing I once felt I had to do to get respect in music. From that point onward, the process of writing lyrics on the record became a joy - I was able to finally translate my sense of humor into the lyrics and I think it's evident in songs like “Manic Pixie Dream Boy.’”
 
Lady Charles is a shape-shifting art rock enchanter/ress from Ottawa. They released their self-titled debut EP in 2022, blending elements of folk, indie rock, and electronica with themes of gender, apocalypse, and loss. Their 2022 singles "Godx,” “Noella (Can’t Get Enough Of You),” and “Flower Boy” brought their sound and image to a wider audience, racking up thousands of listens and views.

​In Their Own Words

Growing up a bullied misfit in a small, boring town outside Ottawa, I turned to music as an escape. Big, layered art rock albums like David Bowie's Diamond Dogs or The Beatles' Abbey Road were my favourites; they felt like entering a different world. When the pandemic hit and the isolation and dread weighed heavy, I decided to go back to that sound and try to create my own version of that type of record. Working on the record became my escape, and I spent many days recording in my home, trying to build a vivid, dreamy world that could be that escape for others.

With live music on hold, I was able to finally step back and think about who I truly wanted to be as a musician. I had spent a long time performing as who I felt others would like instead of being true to myself – but after David Bowie and Prince passed away, reflecting on their stunning ability to stand out from the crowd planted a seed in my head. I had always felt more fluid in terms of my gender, and I had always loved artists who had a larger than life persona. I realized that I owed it to myself to be unashamedly the artist I wanted to be, and so Lady Charles was born. 

I always felt that rock music lends itself to androgyny because at its core I think rock music is a genre that cuts across identities and unites people. It doesn't matter one's sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, or age – if you feel it then you are rock and roll. So my message in being Lady Charles is that you should be yourself even if that self is taboo or controversial. Even if Tennessee thinks you're a sexual thing. You are rock and roll. We all are. And I think that's why a lot of my favourite rock artists could move through masculinity and femininity with ease – at its core rock is humanity, it doesn't recognize society's barriers.

My number one struggle since I first performed live at 10 years old has been my voice. The pandemic left me with a lot of time for reflection and I think the record became something of a summation of everything I'd learned in music up till then. I consciously decided to try to challenge myself to write more complex and exciting music, pushing as a composer to include elements of progressive rock, jazz, classical, and hip hop that I previously only appreciated from afar. Everything from writing orchestral preludes to some of the songs to adapting post-punk disco rhythms to 17/8 time  shows off a little piece of what I love about music. As a result, the album is very personal, like a mixtape of every genre and style that's important to me.
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​The era of streaming lends itself to releasing single songs often rather than full albums. Yet to a lot of music lovers like myself albums are and continue to be incredibly important. Amidst all the short-form content that dominates our world, there's something special about throwing on a record and going on a longer journey through musical worlds. As such I wanted to make this album more than just a collection of songs, but a unified work with its own flow and identity. I tried to structure the album like a journey through a dream world; There are very few gaps and most songs flow into each other yet each stands on its own as well. There is a distinct progression as the album moves through upbeat pop songwriting to more progressive, challenging experimental tracks and then culminates with a dark, jazzy finale. In essence, it's the mixtape of my dreams.

Appropriate to the title, there were even songs that came to me in dreams. On The Downlow was one, which started as a fake Ariel Pink song I heard playing in a dream back in 2020 that I remembered well enough to demo when I woke up. I think that sort of subconscious writing is exciting, and parallels the current wave of AI art. Our brains are AI without the “A”, and it's pretty amazing what they can create when there is zero inhibition. I think including songs like that, as well as using AI trained exclusively on my and my partner Stef's photography to create the surreal album cover gives the album an exciting sense of existing in the liminal space between consciousness and subconscious.

My original goal for the album was to have it be a pretty simple sound with me multitracking against a drum machine. As I shared it with more people, it was suggested to pursue live drumming, and I was able to get in contact with some amazing players like Greg Alsop from Tokyo Police Club and Iajhi Hampden who drums for Raphael Saadiq. It's incredible how great drummers can elevate a song, and it's an outstanding feeling to hear a song you're working on come alive with a really great rhythmic foundation.

I also got the chance to work with an amazing mixing engineer – Erin Tonkon who worked with David Bowie on Blackstar and has mixed for Richard Hell and engineered for Tony Visconti. She immediately recognized the threads of Prince and Bowie and of Montreal influence and helped develop a punchy, balanced sound that recalled those great artists who inspire me while also emphasizing my own unique musical qualities. Her mixes are night and day different from my working mixes, yet completely embody the spirit that I wanted to achieve but didn't have the technical skill to execute.

And when it came time to master the record, we were able to get Sarah Register on board. On top of working with David Bowie herself, she mastered the Shins' Wincing The Night Away which was a very important record for me growing up. It's amazing how a song can sound 'finished' and then in the hands of a great mastering engineer turn into something even more polished and sonically powerful. She and Erin are outstanding talents and I'm incredibly lucky to have had the chance to work with them.

I'd always struggled with control and having an unusual timbre, and having undiagnosed disabilities that affected my co-ordination along with hearing damage meant that it never really came naturally to me. Around 2018 I started very seriously working to re-learn singing and taking lessons with a highly rated local instructor. I began singing every day during the pandemic and worked hard to unlearn bad habits and find a voice I could be proud of. On some songs I did over 100 takes, I became a bit obsessive but it was fun because I was finding my voice while building these tracks. And I'm happy that it paid off, where I once had entire review written trashing my voice I now get regular compliments on my singing. I feel as though this record is my best as a singer and I've now found my voice.

I've always enjoyed writing comedy, and wrote multiple feature film scripts back in high school with my friends. I always struggled, however, translating that into music. When I began working on Manic Pixie Dream Boy something clicked. I found myself drawing from Hip Hop punchlines and weirdo indie rock, dropping the hyper-serious statement writing I once felt I had to do to get respect in music. From that point onward, the process of writing lyrics on the record became a joy – by having more fun in the process I was able to finally translate my sense of humour into the lyrics and I think it's evident across the album in songs like Manic Pixie Dream Boy, I'm Useless for Your Love and Let's Get Conservative.

Flower Boy has its genesis in a chance meeting years ago. I was bored one night and decided to check out a local showcase because one of the artists, Sparklesaurus, had an intriguing name. I was instantly impressed with their retro-flavoured musicality and the songwriter Fliss' compositions. They were perfectly structured folk rock tunes in the vein of Fleetwood Mac – not a single section out of place and with lyrics that cut deep into my soul. I asked to produce their debut album on the spot and we became friends to this day. While Sparklesaurus didn't stay together, Fliss is now a member of Ada Lea in Montreal. When I decided to record some covers this year of friends, influences, and former bands I was in,  their song Flower Boy was one of the first I considered.

Since I was one of the producers on the original version of Flower Boy, I was already quite familiar with the song and was able to approach it from a new angle, knowing more about production than I did years ago. Working with outside mixing and mastering engineers for the first time recently with my upcoming album Manic Pixie Dream World really inspired me to try to up my own recording game, and I think this is the best sounding track I've self-produced.

I wanted to take the 1970's influences already present in the song and push them to their extreme. I am inspired a lot by that era, and freed from having to write the song I was excited to put a lot of effort into the arrangement. I decided to strip the verses back to their barest form and then have the verses burst forth into a full-band arrangement. I decided to draw from a bunch of different classic rock influences – big harmonies like Elton John, distant and otherworldly electric piano and synths like Pink Floyd, dreamy rock choruses like early Kate Bush, Menacing vocal layering and double tracked 12 strings like David Bowie, fuzz guitar like Neil Young, and arpeggiated synthesizers like Tangerine Dream or Philip Glass. Something I truly love about making music is that you can take all these ingredients from your favourite records and still create something very personal and original.

Felicity and I both have a fondness for plants and gardening, and I am a big lover of floral patterns too. Her lyrics often draw on imagery and symbolism from the world of plants, which I love. I find there's a dark sensuality to Flower Boy that recalls poppies or devil's trumpet – beautiful yet dangerous. I kept those plants in the back of my head while working on the arrangement and I think the dark, distant synths really grew from that floral undertone.

A big part of the retro sound came about by happy accident – I was walking home from Ottawa Pride and found an old Yorkville Voice Master tube PA being thrown out, and lugged the massive thing home on the spot. It's a very early PA system built in Toronto in the 60's that's entirely tube based, but with a much simpler and less hi-fi circuit than modern tube amplifiers (meaning it's significantly more 'old' sounding). Despite this, it has a silky, retro sound and I fell in love with it the moment I got it working – it complimented the dark, sultry vocal style I was going for very well. To my surprise, it even had the original made-in-Canada tubes from the 1960's in it and they still worked – so my singing was amplified with a true relic of the 1960's.

While the song is mostly inspired by 70's artists, the bubbling synthesizers were inspired in part by the Stranger Things theme, and the structure is inspired by Radiohead – they were amazing at making songs with building intensity and I took inspiration from their ability to jump from soft sections to big, loud choruses.

I wanted the music video for the song to be simple and evocative – I filmed myself in a couple of outdoor autumn-landscapes with no flowers and then intercut it with vivid images of flowers. This contrast between barren, autumn vibes and summer imagery is meant to represent the distance between the song's narrator and the flower boy they sing about. The solo-performance-outdoors thing is a nod to Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights which is a classic early music video that's dead simple and quite beautiful. I'm wearing a polyester suit from 1970's Montreal, a 1970's disco shirt and playing an arch-top guitar from the 1950's. The simplicity and retro feel and styling are meant to make the video feel like a lost relic of the 1970's. It's much more of an old-school promo video than a post-MTV music video – a simple evocation of the song's mood.

I think nostalgia is a fascinating thing because we can feel it for eras we didn't even experience. I wasn't born in the 70's yet grew up listening to classic rock music. While I have the benefit of decades more music to draw from, it is really fun to build up songs that could have maybe existed in previous decades. I believe that creating music is a bit akin to creating worlds – the entire musical landscape of a song can be a living, breathing world to get lost in. I think a lot of young people feel a lot of nostalgia for eras before their time – especially in times of social unrest and economic troubles that urge to escape is great. Coming off a pandemic into a recession, I think we all can use the escape that music provides – it can recreate pasts that never existed, and point to possible futures.

One thing that I love from old 70's records is how artists were able to make bigger and bolder recordings with a lot of detail. Growing up a misfit in a boring suburb, it was records like David Bowie's Diamond Dogs and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon that felt the most like an escape, because the intricate details and massive walls of sound felt like an entire world to get lost in. I've held that close to my heart since the pandemic because I feel as though the world needs more music to get lost in, to escape to, to fall in love with. Having so much contrast and so many different layered parts in the song was my way of trying to recreate the feel of those classic albums within a single track.
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