Recording under the moniker Paper Beat Scissors for over a decade, England-born, Montreal-based musician Tim Crabtree has developed his ideas in the most natural way. Inhabiting his musical visions for long periods of time, Crabtree has build up a diverse musical background which comes to inform his style. His forthcoming third full-length album, Parallel Line, draws upon rock, pop and folk and washes the three together with lush chamber orchestration, Crabtree’s delicate vocal style skating over the sound in emotive swirls.
Not content with graceful intricacy as an end in itself, the album’s complexity extends to its thematic concerns too. “A parallel line can only be defined, can only exist, in relation to something else,” reads the accompanying explanation for the album, hinting at the central questions of the release. “How do we qualify ourselves by others’ presence/absence? How is our sense of self strung within a multitude of people, places, experiences, all gently bent and wandering?”
We’re happy to unveil a brand new single ahead of the album’s release. ‘All It Was’ highlights the tender emotion and sophisticated style of Paper Beat Scissors, the instrumentation’s yearning tone matched by the searching vocals of Crabtree. “For me this song is about coming out the other side after being really blindly caught up in something you’d given over a huge sense of importance to,” Crabtree explains. “That sense of just emerging out of the fog of something you thought was huge and significant, but then, kind of, the curtain gets pulled back on the Wizard of Oz and there’s just this ordinary man there.”
This goes a long way in explaining the overall sound of the track, understandably downbeat but flecked with a wistful fondness too. For all of the longing and questioning, there’s a suggestion that the track is moving toward a firmer understanding, as though in the sudden absence of one’s driving force they might find themselves once again. “There’s a sense of disillusionment there in the song,” Crabtree continues, “but also a sense of relief, of re-finding the ground.”
Photos, in order of appearance, by: Ana Cláudia Silva, Stacy Lee & Alex Pearson