It took Cassia Hardy a decade of songwriting and a lifetime of experience to make In Relation, her debut solo album.
An artist known for fronting Wares, Hardy is always working. Some of her songs made sense for Wares, a relatively noisy rock band, but others didn't. By 2014, she started stockpiling the orphans, beginning with the acoustic song "See You Around," In Relation's final track. "It was just clear to me that this is not a band song," she recalls thinking, though she couldn't put her finger on why. "I don't know what's gonna happen with this, but I really like it."
Survival, Hardy's most recent Wares album, dropped in the spring of 2020. Critically acclaimed, she couldn't tour in support of it because of the pandemic — a tough pill to swallow for an artist who describes much of her output as "a thinly veiled excuse to just get on stage and play loud music."
When Hardy was finally unleashed, the scene she'd once known, and many of the bands she saw as peers, no longer existed. "I happened to come out the other end of it knowing that I was still gonna write songs, and I still wanted to live this life and share art with people," she says. But given the changed landscape, she wanted to take a different tack.
In January of 2022, she travelled from her native Edmonton to Dawson City, YT, where she spent the month as a songwriter-in-residence at Macaulay House. "My pitch to them was, 'I needed to figure out the difference between Wares and Cassia Hardy,'" she recalls. She spent a month doing a lot of "heartwork," learning how to relive and recontextualize her past, and ultimately wrote what would become the bulk of In Relation.
She cites Rae Spoon and Iven E. Coyote's collaborative book Gender Failure, as well as artists like Cindy Lee's Patrick Flegel and Fiver's Simone Schmidt, as "stalwart influences for songwriting in my life, [and] for the thought and the care they put behind just asking, 'How else we can do this?'" By the end of her time in Dawson City, Hardy still couldn't outwardly express the difference in words, "but it was super vivid and crystal [clear] in my mind."
She also took inspiration from nêhiyawak's Marek Tyler, with whom Hardy plays in indie supergroup Wayfinding and Tyler's electronic band ASKO. "He's not getting super granular with mixing decisions [compared to] me, who's on day four of guitar tone revisions," she jokes. "He's trying to capture a vibe, and he's trying to be in the moment."
Hardy did her best to embrace that approach, improvising parts or writing on the fly in the studio. Still, personal tumult ensured periods where the record, laden with personal feelings and past recollections, languished on her hard drive, with Hardy unsure how to proceed. "Hopefully, I don't have permanent brain damage about putting an album out. Hopefully, it won't take me 100 years to do another one," she says.
In Relation is a reflective record about change and loss. "It's a difficult album," she admits. "I've lost friends, I've lost houses, I've lost places I work." But, similar to its creation, it's also about community and resilience and a reminder that we're not alone in our experiences and emotions. "The other side of it is that we can talk about it together," Hardy reflects.
As part of her mission to get away from "plastic and petroleum forms of music distribution," Hardy isn't releasing it on vinyl or CD, nor will it be available on the major DSPs like Spotify (taking a page from Steve Albini and Ian MacKaye and their advocacy for analogue storage, it will be available on cassette).
Instead, she will stream it on her Bandcamp and it will be available for download via a QR code that's part of a zine that includes photos, lyrics and essays about some of the record's social themes from Edmonton writers Kyla Pascal and Rylan Kafara.
"I'm not trying to make it difficult to listen to my music." She points to the early years of DSPs, where a lot of fans embraced the broader music culture as a way to be represented in mainstream culture, with the hope of shaping or subverting it: "It's a different mindset to: 'We're gonna make our own alternative culture over here.'"
That alternative culture, with which Hardy still very much identifies, continues to thrive, even if most people never take note of it. "It is still possible to carve out a life for yourself outside of these streaming giants," she says. "I'm not gonna say that I have any definitive answers, but with this zine, I'm just gonna see how interested people are in following me."