“Had I not been bound to silence I could have produced proof enough of a broken heart even for you.” This line, said by Elinor to Marianne in Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility, provided the source of the title of Proof Enough, a new six-song release by Michael Cormier-O’Leary, coming this February via Dear Life Records. Lifting the idea out of the romantic context in which Austen was writing, Cormier-O’Leary uses Proof Enough to explore the innate desire to communicate and evidence one’s feelings within a familial setting. That is, to not only display our emotions to those around us, but to prove their validity and depth. The family unit is tight yet hierarchical, bound by figures of authority, though no one version of its life, be that exterior or interior, is more true than any other. Everything, spoken and unspoken, holds an equal significance. Only in the whole can we come to see reality.
Michael Cormier-O’Leary uses a speculative, narrative-based style to delve into this idea, blending fiction and autobiography to fully capture the cross-generational dynamics at play. Nowhere is this clearer than on lead single ‘Marilyn’, a song which follows its five-year-old protagonist as she attempts to escape family life by drawing new worlds of her own. “Marilyn / is off in her own little world again,” goes the opening verse, “where a crayon can / turn us into clowns / turn us inside out.” Yet this youthful experience serves as a mirror too. It brings into relief the adult longing to also escape life with no more than a blank sheet of paper, as well as the gap in understanding between the generations, as though each is broadcasting on a slightly different frequency. “It’s a story about a five-year-old named Marilyn who escapes into her crayon drawings to block out the noise of her home life and her parents’ desire but inability to do the same,” Cormier-O’Leary explains. “In the song’s outro, there are two restated melodies that oscillate back and forth chromatically, suggesting a family unit out of sync or at least having a particularly bad day.”
Photo by Abi Reimold