Honesty by The Lifers

The Lifers—led by sisters Anita and Liv Cazzola—have been pushing the boundaries of folk music since they embarked on their first cross-Canada tour (sans car…just on buses, trains, and boats) in 2015.

After years of consistent touring, recording and dreaming together, Liv and Anita recognized that their relationship had begun to fray. Anita was struggling with a lifelong anxiety disorder while nurturing her visual art practice, and Liv was trying to maintain presence while managing a constant flood of current and potential musical projects. And the effort the sisters needed to muster to see their visions through as an indie act—such as hiring a 12-piece band for the Honey Suite release shows to properly recreate every sound on the album (with elaborate stage decoration, no less)—required constant communication, cooperation, and legwork.

Liv and Anita needed to reconnect—to themselves, and to each other. Throughout the haphazard early months of the pandemic, the sisters re-learned how to just be together without the pressure of discussing the next album or preparing for a future tour. The band hit a hard reset, but soon began a soft emergence.

Songs began to flow: frank, poetic articulations of sexual trauma and intergenerational pain. On “Overcome (with an adoration),” the sisters consider the origins of the saintly temperaments of their devout grandmothers, whose patriarchal religious beliefs clashed with their frequent brushes with death. “Relived” recounts three stories of sexual trauma (“I didn’t mean to give my love away, but he took it out from me”), “Haunt” recalls the pain of sharing these stories with family (“I finally told my sister after five years / Of almost but shameful”), and “Don’t Touch Me” concludes with a call to end the cycle of sexual trauma that has impacted “our mothers and their mothers,” summoning instead “gentle, patient kindness / simple, ancient kindness”. Held within this collection of songs is the tenacity of growth, of a better path forward. “We can bend full circle in a life,” Anita sings, “And in time, I might.”

Amongst these candid retellings of hidden stories, Liv and Anita also wrote songs to mend their own relationship. Collaborating on both lyrics and music for the first time, Liv and Anita co-wrote the title track “Honesty.” Beginning with Anita’s anxiety attack backstage after a festival performance, the song unfurls as they unpack all the baggage of their relationship. The song is an intimate conversation, in which Liv sings “I fear I caused the worst in you again,” and Anita responds: “I said you’d all be better off if I left.” It’s a masterclass in candour, with palpable empathy leading to its vulnerable conclusion: “I’m still healing over here.”

Once the songs were crafted, the album’s title became obvious. It would be called 'Honesty'.

For the recording of 'Honesty', The Lifers re-united the six-piece band-family, along with new producer Sam Gleason (Jeremy Dutcher, Tim Baker, Charlotte Cornfield) at Port William Sound—a studio nestled in the rolling, snow-laden hills of Frontenac County, Ontario. The band huddled by the wood stove between takes, slow-cooked one-pot dinners in the evenings, and spent 12-hour shifts in a hot control room with endless creative exploration deftly shepherded by Gleason. The Lifers were screaming into guitar pickups, manually controlling tape delay, reversing drum loops…and, frequently, erupting into fits of laughter.

“In the studio, we were able to turn the trauma into a safe, goofy, wild, fun, and expressive space,” Anita explains, “and it helped me move past these experiences after so long…finally letting these stories live outside my body.”

Many of the songs were performed live-off-the-floor, as when the full band tracked the painfully intimate “Relived.” The band recorded take after take, back-to-back, their vulnerability increasingly palpable as tears began to flow. Anita recalls, “I knew when we finally had the take; it felt like I had turned myself inside out.”

While wringing out negative experiences was core to the album’s creation, 'Honesty' is ultimately a work about the solidarity and love that emerges from collaborative reckoning. The song “Enough” ties these threads together, inviting the listener into their own potent softness: “Now I’ve wrapped myself in patchwork blankets of power, and lift myself up to the sky.” The album’s ethos was best articulated in the studio when Anita gave a creative direction to bassist Sam Fitzpatrick while they were trying to figure out the feel of a particular bass line: “less angry; more empowered.”

'Honesty' is an album of post-folk caresses and indie-rock bangers, reflecting The Lifers exactly where they are right now: reemerging with vivid dreams, clear intentions, and a lot less baggage. As Liv reflects: “we were ready to say ‘this is what I want, this is how I hear it.’ We followed our own instincts, and respected one another’s.” The resultant new work is flowing with direct calls to feel deeper, love gentler, and have fun despite all the shit.

The Lifers are a sister-fronted six-piece, addressing sexual trauma and intergenerational pain through post-folk caresses and indie-rock bangers. Their music invites you to feel deeper, love gentler, and have fun despite all the shit.

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