Connor James described his seven-year relationship as existing within a snow globe.
He could see each individual scene play out within the glass. The morning when it finally happened. All of the complex feelings leading up to it. The freeing hopelessness that came afterward.
“I never wanted to wake up from the dream you had for us,” James sings on the title track of his band’s latest album, Last Everythings. “But you must have known that I’d never catch up.”
James fronts June Body, an alternative rock trio from Halifax originating in 2017 featuring guitarist Alex Callaghan and drummer Matt Schofield. After three successful albums, sold-out shows, cross-country tours, and several Music Nova Scotia nominations, the band’s Death Cab for Cutie-inspired tone has only become punchier and more innovative.
Yet, the theme of Last Everythings, a long-term relationship coming to a mutually agreed upon end, is far from June Body’s first time tackling James’ complicated romance. Their third album, Never Here For Long, spoke to the premonitions James would later detail on Last Everythings, with him quoted as saying, “I was writing songs about leaving the relationship I was in, and I didn’t even know it.”
Last Everythings is James allowing the world to see into his snow globe. Each scene is painted with soaring vocals, raw guitar riffs mixed with American Football-style passages, and a steady yet progressive beat that moves each track from slow reflections to high-velocity emotional bursts, paired with heart-wrenching lyrics of dysfunctional love.
“I wanted to capture that on the record,” said James in an interview with The Coast. “I wanted the lyricism to be domestic and simple.”
Finding melancholy
The aforementioned title track, the first on the album, describes all of the “last everythings”: last coffees, last walks, and the “last time putting this off.”
“It’s that moment where you kind of realize, like, oh, this is the last time we’re going to be together. This is the last time we’re ever doing this, and you feel it,” said James.
The title track is the thematic setup, but it wasn’t always intended to be that way. In fact, the band only decided on the album’s title and tracklist during the last night of their recording sessions.
“We were super drunk, just hanging out, then the drummer was like, ‘What if we call it Last Everythings and this was the track listing?’
“First, I didn’t take him seriously, because I’m like, dude, we’re wasted. This is a bad idea. And then we woke up the next morning, and we were like, ‘Oh my God. No, he was right.’”
It might’ve been a decision fueled by impairment, but it was the right one, says James.
“It’s just simple. It’s words that carry a lot of weight.”
The story behind their tracklist is all the more baffling when listeners hear the seamless transition between each track, barely giving them a moment to rest from the emotional highs and lows. This was the work of sound engineer and James’ roommate, Gordon Huntley.
“I could just sit in with him in his bedroom, and we could really finesse the transitions,” said James. “I don’t know, all three of us just love records with dope transitions, and we just wanted it to flow and flow and keep flowing, and you don’t really have a moment to pause except for the end of side A, essentially, when ‘Fine Print’ comes to kind of a slow ending.”
Most of the songs on the album use an open tuning, allowing for melancholic riffs to drive the songs forward into punchy chords. James felt inspired by Elliott Smith, who uses an open D tuning to achieve a permeating sadness.
“You have the chunkiness of the drop D tuning on the lower strings, but then the high strings can just ring outwards, either open or with different shapes, and it just has this beautiful, nostalgic sound to it,” described James.
The pacing of each track was also inspired by artists James was listening to at the time.
“I was really influenced by artists who had these, you know, big crescendos in their songs,” he said. “Because we’re a trio, we have to find ways of being dynamic that you can’t do with just more instruments. A lot of that, for us, comes down to song structures and arrangements giving you those dynamics.”
Performing with PUP
On Aug. 2 and 3, June Body will open for Canadian punk-rock band PUP at the Light House Arts Centre. While it isn’t their first time performing for a band with such legendary status—they opened for JUNO-award-winning all-girl rock band The Beaches in 2023—James is nonetheless excited.
“It’s an amazing opportunity to make some new fans. I feel like our music will bode well with their fan base,” he said. “And, you know, all three of us are huge fans, as well.”
The band will also be performing an all-ages album release show at Radstorm in Halifax on July 27 alongside several other local bands. They plan on selling vinyls of Last Everythings produced locally by Fresh Biscuit Records, a sister label of Obsolete Records. The same vinyl can also be purchased on their website.
