Track: Colin Stetson – The Love It Took To Leave You

Award-winning Canadian-American saxophonist and composer Colin Stetson has announced details of his first solo recording since 2017. The new album titled ‘The Love It Took To Leave’ will be released on the 13th of September via Invada Records (excl. N America) and Envision Records (North America).

As a teaser to the album, Stetson has shared the title track written some years ago and a composition Stetson has been performing for several years but has been waiting for the right context to bring its full emotional and musical anatomy to life. Voiced through alto saxophone, it sets a scene saturated with yearning – ruminating on the conflicted aches and oscillations that arise from love lost, the grasping, the collapse; and the rebuild, the struggle for dignity, self-compassion, and finally liberation.

Recorded over a week in early 2023 at The Darling Foundry, a 144-year-old former metalworks facility in Montreal now transformed into a contemporary art complex, with a voluminous main room that still maintains its raw architecture of brick, concrete and steel. Colin says “We were using the same live setup as I normally would to amplify – a full PA in the building’s spaces – so we were really able to move the kind of air that I can move, really saturating the room, hitting the walls hard. And then we further fleshed it out.

About the track Stetson comments:

“The first and titular song on my latest record, performed on solo alto saxophone, ‘The love it took to leave you’ is a love letter to self and to solitude and to tall old trees that sway and creak in the wind and rain.”

Eerie and captivating, the acoustic tones of the performance space and the percussive elements of Stetson’s playing burst and mould around each other, giving everything a delayed loop as new melodic ideas are birthed in the static. It’s music you can’t take your ears off.

Check it out, here