I meet Caitlin Woelfle-O'Brien at the historic Broadview Hotel, which she promptly informs me used to be a strip club. "When they first converted it, everyone was kind of weirded out that it was, like, this swag hotel," the native of Toronto's East End behind Blunt Chunks remembers.
With its green damask wallpaper and opulent, circular bar with a shock of neon lighting overhead, the posh locale is where Woelfle-O'Brien ended up on a significant first date shortly after its reopening. She wrote the single "High Hopes" — a Lilith Fair-era alt-rock-inspired song that spirals from a withdrawn saunter to jazz-inflected exasperation — from her debut album, The Butterfly Myth (out April 19 on Telephone Explosion Records), about that person.
Although she admittedly she hasn't been back since, the singer-songwriter laments the loss of so many local haunts she holds affection for. "It's a black hole, pretty much," Woelfle-O'Brien says of the current inhabitable Toronto landscape.
Despite her roots and networks, she struggles like the rest of us to make ends meet and find sensible supplementary jobs that can support her. "It's a really, really bizarre game, and I'm starting to just think, 'What is gonna happen? This can't go on.'"
She wrote album opener "Fill My Cup" — which I tell her I remember from a live set for its wonderful mic-drop line about ugly malls — about these very real day-to-day struggles of not being able to afford to exist in this place. "I now just call it the Toronto diss track," the artist laughs.
"I wrote it years and years ago, probably a few months before COVID hit," she says, going on to explain the confounding influence of coping with depression and living downtown. "I hated that if I left my house, I could either go left, down to Queen West, which was hectic, or right to Dundas West, which was hectic. Or keep going to Bloor, which was hectic. It's like, where do you escape to?"
This sense of seeking some form of relief also has threads in Woelfle-O'Brien's father, who had been living with dementia for several years at that point, and died a couple months after she wrote "Fill My Cup." His death ended up informing The Butterfly Myth more greatly than she even realized.
"I didn't know what to write. I didn't know what to call the record, I didn't know what to make," she recalls, having been approached by producer David Plowman of Patchwork Sound years before eventually working with him on her 2022 self-titled EP because she didn't manage to call him until after her dad died. "I didn't know anything, and I was getting into The Artist's Way," the artist reflects. "I just did a stream-of-consciousness about the record, and what came out of that was that this record's about grief."
Across many cultures, butterflies are considered symbolic of the souls of people no longer here appearing to reassure those they left behind. When Woelfle-O'Brien realized that this thread of grief was tying the album together, she started doing research. A friend sent her an episode of a mythology podcast about butterflies.
"The way butterflies are created, in the cocoon, they're actually going through such a painful process of transformation," she tells me. "The science behind the cell turnover is directly linked to the resistance of the caterpillar to change. It triggers a chemical reaction."
This immediately resonated with the artist. "I'm really stubborn, so it took me way too long to go to therapy, for example," she explains.
"There's other people I've tried to work with before that just didn't quite get what I was doing or didn't quite have the materials to do my project justice," Woelfle-O'Brien says. "Without David, nothing, none of this would happen. None of this would exist."
With contributions from the whole community surrounding Plowman's studio — including Karen Ng (Andy Shauf), Ed Squires (Badge Époque Ensemble, U.S. Girls), Diego Greta (André 3000) and Quinn Bates (Quarterback), as well as members of Mother Tongues, Bernice, Queer Songbook Orchestra and Woelfle-O'Brien's Jaunt bandmates, Duncan Hood and Nick Nausbaum — the fledgling existence of The Butterfly Myth does feel like a miracle of sorts. And even in the push-pull of deadlines to get the album finished that eventually ensued, its incubation was also deeply informing in expected ways.
The mythology behind Blunt Chunks can be traced back far before the album. The singer-songwriter began the project when she lived in Montreal while attending Concordia. There, her former partner Tim Lafontaine (Cop Car Bonfire) first introduced her to delay and effects pedals, and she began making experimental soundscapes she would perform in galleries and DIY spaces.
"When I dropped out of university, I bought an autoharp," Woelfle-O'Brien recalls. "Because I didn't really know how to play guitar; I still don't really know," adding that the instrument was significant in helping her turn her sketches into actual songs — which is why she decided to feature an antique version of an autoharp in the album artwork.
Blunt Chunks was born shortly thereafter, christened with a weed joke she had come up with on the spot while on the phone with Lafontaine, who was working with a friend on a project called Girls Gone Bong. "I was like, 'That's horrible,'" Woelfle-O'Brien remembers. She jokingly suggested adding "featuring Blunt Chunks."
"Part of the name, actually, was kind of like, 'You know, Grimes did a cool thing like that,'" she says of her peer in the underground electronic scene of that era, who regularly worked with Lafontaine.
The singer-songwriter explains, "I thought I was going to be doing electronic stuff, which I do want to eventually do," adding that the name Blunt Chunks tends to elicit a mixed reaction. "But then I ended up going toward this beautiful folky indie stuff."
She adds, "But we'll see. The journey has just begun."
And like anyone on the beginning of a journey — even if it isn't really the beginning — she's been coping with the unknown, trying to balance going with her gut and listening to what other people recommend.
"I've been a bit exhausted by making choices about the record," Woelfle-O'Brien admits. "I just don't know right now. But I am happy that it happened. I'm excited to just have it out there and show this side of things."
From effects pedal sound art and lo-fi electronic to whatever gorgeously verdant post-genre mishmash Blunt Chunks has evolved into, The Butterfly Myth hatches from the chrysalis into a sound that feels limitless.
"I think there's something definitely sweet there that connects the dots," the singer-songwriter observes. "There's something that touches people."