David Usher calls it "the monolith."
the group of Canadian alt. rock acts his band Moist is often categorized with.  Yet an alphabetical list is about the only place you can honestly file Moist between I Mother Earth and Our Lady Peace.  To start, Moist's first victory came from a self-financed video for "Push," not a big-budget launch.  Second, where others put guitar solos, Moist uses keyboards.  Plus, Moist is only one word, not three.

"I'm an adult person, and there are not dishonest thoughts.  The audience can handle it." 

While the band is undoubtedly a democracy, much of its uniqueness comes from Usher himself.  On the surface, his angular androgyny and ambiguous ethnicity stand in stark contrast to his buff GQ compryiyion.  More importantly, in a field of lyricists enamoured with metaphor and grand gesture, Usher is perhaps the most oblique, the most dedicated to the written word.

"I think Creature, because it was our sophomore record, put a lot of pressure on the band," he says.  "Despite how much we denied it, it came from all corners, including ourselves.  The timeline was very intense, for example.  I wanted to do something more improvisational and a little less technical."

Usher has  hardly escaped intense timelines.  It's a cold February morning 
in Montreal (he's an early riser), and he is simultaneously working his new release and preparing for a third Moist record.  Three days later, he'll be in Mexico City, filming the video for Little Songs' first single, "Foresfire," all before his album has even undergone final mastering.  It's the reverse juggling act he mastered to complete this project, writing the ten songs over the past three years and recording them in three short sessions in the gaps of Moist's touring schedule.

To pull it off, Usher kept the process simple.  He and co-producer/engineer Paul Northfield set up in Usher's kitchen, capturing vocals in one or two takes.  On the false start to "F-Train," and in the quite spaces between words, you an hear the intimacy of the room, sometimes even the sound of Usher's breath in your ear.  He admits that the listener is supposed to feel that they are sitting there.

In this case, the package first the product, Little Songs is essentially Usher's voice and his acoustic guitar (along with subtle, precise placement of cello, trumpet, and organ).  The use of electronic drum loops on "Trickster" (which features Julie and Jonathan from My Brilliant Beast), "Jesus Was My Girl," "Forestfire" and "Mood Song" (recorded on David's 4-track back in Vancouver) dispel the folk tag, but also make the album impossible to categorize.  One thing is certain, stripped-down should not be mistaken for unsophisticated:  Little Songs tackles some weighty thoughts.

"It was originally..well, it still is, called Little Songs to Fuck To," explains Usher.  "But I just couldn't put that on the cover.  It was partly pressure, but I also found that a lot of my female friends thought it could be taken the wrong way.  I don't mind offending men all the time, but the thought that it could be taken in a sexist way - that I didn't want."

He calls the title an "inside joke," a light-hearted take on the Leonard Cohen records Songs of Love and Hate and Songs From a Room, of which he's a fan, but admits that not everyone shares his sense of humour.

There is no such second-guessing in the songs themselves.  Usher says that Little Songs is very much like opening his journal, and the material is as raw in emotion as it is in production.  Subject matter is often vague; words like "motherfucker"
(30 seconds into the album's first track) are not.  He's hardly the first to curse in pop music (and has done it before on Moist's 1995 single "Machine Punch Through"), but considering his band's very visible adolescent-girl audience, it does seem slightly bold.

"I'm 31," Usher responds.  "I'm an adult person, and these are not dishonest thoughts.  The audience can handle it."  A short pause, then slight laughter.  "Yes, there are some bad words in there. Oh well."

It's the simple words, once strung together, that prove more unsettling than any blaspheme.  While it's true that, once heard, lyrics become more about the listener than the creator, it's difficult not to attribute such personal musing s back to Usher.  It's especially awkward to reconcile lines like "All the times I used your body"; "Sex got ugly"; or "But violence changes/Changes the light/And now I've grown so empty again" with the fact that Usher is a newlywed, and supposedly a happy guy. Although most songs were written long before he tied the knot last year, Usher says dealing with the exposure of his most private thoughts is an ongoing issue, especially now that he's the sole author.....