Families are funny things. If we aren’t attempting to escape their overbearing confines, we’re pining for the love and security they can offer. The people in our family might know us more intimately than is comfortable, yet often fail to grasp the fundamental essence of who we are. How do we negotiate the fact that our family history indelibly shapes us, while still retaining an awareness of our own agency to map our own lives? Is it helpful to try to talk about any of this? Is it even possible? These complex, often contradictory questions form the core of Proof Enough, the latest EP from Michael Cormier-O’Leary on Dear Life Records. A release which weaves biography and fiction to explore how we are moulded by our relations, as well as the ways we might try (and fail) to communicate across generations in order to establish our identity and independence.
The EP’s title, repurposed from a line said by Elinor to Marianne in Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility (“Had I not been bound to silence I could have produced proof enough of a broken heart even for you”), forms the basis of this mission. “Lifting the idea out of the romantic context in which Austen was writing,” we wrote in our preview back in January:
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.
Opener ‘Marilyn’ embodies the speculative, narrative-based style Michael Cormier-O’Leary adopts across the release, “blending,” as we continued, “fiction and autobiography to fully capture the cross-generational dynamics at play.” The titular five-year-old protagonist draws new worlds as a way to escape family life, not only evoking a distinctly youthful experience but also holding up a mirror in which older generations might recognise their own deep-seated desires. For adults also long find respite from everyday existence, even if the wish takes a different form from that of their children. The result sees Cormier-O’Leary expertly delineate the gap in understanding between the generations which persists despite shared commonalities. “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,” he 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.”
This willingness to span the generations continues across Proof Enough, and forms a key part of its compassionate tone. The first song Cormier-O’Leary wrote for the project, ‘Del’ takes its name from his paternal grandfather and delves into the silences which can settle between fathers and sons, picking at the ways in which a failure to communicate represents both difference and, ironically, kinship, and how others ways of signalling closeness might emerge. “There’s some way even though it’s unspoken, that a kind of bond could occur with these two people that can’t really talk to each other,” Cormier-O’Leary explains. “They’re both internalizing the same songs.” Likewise, as with ‘Marilyn’ before it, the track is also able to hold apparently competing emotions simultaneously, recognising silence as a gesture of kindness or forbearance as well as something frustrating and limiting.
Maybe he thinks
Silence means safety
From all the harmful
Words he could say
The rest of the EP unfolds in a similarly nuanced manner. ‘Sky Is Blue’ grapples with mortality, especially the blast radius of death and how it impacts a family unit. The song is delivered from the perspective of the ailing individual and imploring those who will survive them to embrace life after their passing. ‘Gouache’ deals with death of a different kind, a child who breaks with the expectations of their lineage and buries a certain aspect of their identity, while the honeyed glow of ‘Staring’ considers the beauty of transience in order to better appreciate the present moment, however much water has already passed beneath the bridge.
Closer ‘Pressed Flowers’ follows a similar theme, though exists at the opposite end of the spectrum. A song written in the wake of a wedding which looks to preserve the memories much like the activity of its title. An effort to cling onto the most precious of moments which by its very nature evokes the inevitable pull of loss. Notable events like weddings make this experience clear. But Proof Enough demonstrates how something similar occurs each and every day. There are special moments within the mundane which might be lost if we do not make the effort to catch them. And these moments come in a variety of forms, flavours and shades, much like any set of relations. One final reminder, then, that every family is a complicated system, and each individual contributes to its ever-changing shape.
Proof Enough is out now via Dear Life Records and available from the Michael Cormier-O’Leary Bandcamp page.