“All of us are better when we’re adored.”

 

The very last line sung across the eight songs and 25 minutes of Featherweights, the new offering from Owen Meany’s Batting Stance, is a typically literate paraphrase from songwriter Daniel Walker, who pulled the “beautiful, universal sentiment” from Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief. “It really fit in with what I was writing about at the time.”

It’s been three years since Owen Meany’s debut EP, and in that time Walker has toured across Canada and overseas, dealt with the thrills and lulls of the music industry, and written eight more of his singularly voiced short stories that describe the everyday with carefully chosen adjectives, deep insight, and thoughtful perspective.

Inspired by the likes of The Weakerthans, Neko Case, The Mountain Goats, and Jenny Lewis, here Walker looked to another peer of those artists’, Conor Oberst, who in 2004 as Bright Eyes released the warm and folky I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and the more experimental, colder Digital Ash in a Digital Urn in tandem. Walker used that template for Featherweights. “The first half is more acoustic, punchy, reflective of the last record,” he says, “whereas the last half is a bit darker and more analogue/digital. There’s the lightness and the darkness to it.”

Lyrically—and few artists hold lyrics to careful and delicate heart like Walker does—“each song has its own story and its own independent, breathing thing,” he says. Featherweights opens with “The Androgynous Hockey Stick,” a mediation on toxic masculinity; follows the band on tour in “Krakow,” where Walker laments the harsh beauty of the road while carrying “a bag containing homesickness”; spins a fable steeped in religion and organ on “Empty Vespers” and ends in the middle of a breakup on “Breakfast Again,” where the album’s thesis statement closes the whole thing out.

Recorded above a fishmonger’s shop in the north end of Halifax with producer Palmer Jamieson (beauts, Devarrow), Featherweights boasts the Owen Meany live band—bassist Cailen Alcorn Pygott and keyboardist Siobhan Martin—as well as a host of top-tier Halifax musicians, including drummer Michael Belyea, vocalists Kim Harris and Emilee Sorrey, and trumpeter Daniel Ledwell. Together they carry out Walker’s off-kilter song structures, dynamic and intense, sometimes swelling with fervour, others delicate as a whisper. The soft chords of folk pushed into the angles of indie rock, crammed with meticulously crafted couplets that invite repeated, endlessly revealing listens.

“The featherweights are the heavy burdens that we place on ourselves that are imagined, or that we can create by overthinking,” says Walker. “Trying to reconcile with gut instinct versus an anxious mind.”