Music

Meet November's X3 Artist of the Month: Rich Aucoin

by Nicole Villeneuve

The afternoon of the day of Rich Aucoin‘s album release show in Halifax, he’s mostly alone in St. Matthew’s Church, sitting behind a piano in jeans and a t-shirt and a ball cap, his head near swallowed by huge headphones as he tinkers on his laptop and checks his phone. Later, he’ll be surrounded by a sold-out audience, on stage again, but now with four drummers, the rest of a traditional band and then some, a string section, a choir, and a rotating cast of solo singers, totaling somewhere near 100 people on stage. Aucoin will lead the band and the room in a soul-stirring recreation of his new album, We’re All Dying To Live, an exploration in sound and connectedness that took a year and a half, a trip across the country and back, and 500 people (individually about 360 people and a couple of choirs) to make.

We got sneak peeks at the project along the way—this year’s Public Publication EP was a small slice of progressive electro-pop that already sounded too big for its format, and Aucoin’s live shows have always communicated what he’s been working toward on record; sound experimentation, community, collaboration, all wrapped up in a bigger philosophical blanket of positive and deliberate life living. We’re All Dying To Live‘s thesis stayed clear from the beginning, but as Aucoin explains, the process got a little unwieldy along the way.

“It was originally just going to be an EP, and then somewhere around the 150th participant mark, I realized it couldn’t fit on an EP anymore,” Aucoin says. “I wanted to go across the country and record people. I didn’t have a number or a goal in mind. [By the time] I got back to Halifax, my apartment was like a doctor’s office. Every friend came over every hour on the hour for like a one-month period. [Then it] was a year of me just sitting in my basement being really overwhelmed.”

The epic 22-track record was an ambitious undertaking for Aucoin not only for its sheer scope, but for the fact that Aucoin had previously only ever played music casually in school bands or on keys with friends from time to time. When he finished focusing on philosophy in university, he decided to make an album, but the academic in him didn’t disappear; it’s evident in his essay-writing approach to making music, including his thematic choices of life and love.

Influenced by everything from Sufjan Stevens and the Beach Boys to Howard Hughes, author Douglas Coupland, and Ian Curtis’ last moments (“Watching Herzog And Listening To The Idiot”), Aucoin masterfully conveys his influence as inspiration, and in so doing, not only avoids sounding derivative from a critical standpoint, but ultimately ends up being even more inclusive. As for whether or not he feels his grand efforts are understood, Aucoin defers not to critical attention, but to the people who help create the experience with him.

“The best positive reinforcement is having the people who come to the shows tell me to keep doing it,” he says. “I’ve put my phone number on the screen at festivals [for a download link] and gotten like 500 text messages of people being like, ‘really had a good time!’ Sometimes it takes a few hours to get back to everyone, but I do.”