Once Only Imagined was excellent but the band's latest CD Lullabies for the Dormant Mind is a bloody masterpiece. Take the first record and just add more. The songs are even better, stretching both in scope and execution. Elements of many styles have been thrown into a toxic gumbo that results in something that is instantly The Agonist. Alissa's arresting vocals have reached new heights, both literally and figuratively. Marino has expanded his impressive arsenal of guitar chops while Kells keeps bass duties rooted in a firm foundation. Possibly the best surprise is the addition of drummer McKay who gives the band a complete kick up the rear end, delivering a workshop in powerhouse drumming.

It was a great pleasure to speak with Alissa recently and really dig into her lyrics giving greater and clearer insight into her well thought-out and interesting subject matter.

antiMusic: The new record is called Lullabies for the Dormant Mind. Are you trying to intimate that the population at large are basically sheep?

Alissa: (laughs). Yeah, I mean, without being condescending. That's definitely implied.

antiMusic: What was the angle of the title on a larger scale?

Alissa: Basically, it has to do with what you mentioned. I sort of came up with it, the title half way through writing the album. You know, the music itself is obviously not soft and quiet like a lullaby (laughs). Like, really a lullaby is something that is a soft, soothing song that puts the active mind to rest. And our album is sort of the opposite; it's an exciting, loud album to sort of wake up the sleeping mind. Now the music itself with the lyrics, we sort of thought represented in a good way, not enlightenment, not awakening because, I'm not going to kid myself, I know I'm not enlightening anyone but we just wanted to make sure that people who would listen to it could also read the lyrics and maybe get something out of it that they hadn't thought about before. Because, already as it is, people who listen to our music are open minded, so yeah, that is kind of the story behind the title.

antiMusic: When did this record start to take shape? Were you writing on the road or was it only when you concluded touring for Once Only Imagined that you sat down to take this on?

Alissa: We actually started writing it sort of while we were on the road, with Once Only Imagined. "The Tempest", the first song on the album was actually written way before we even played that on our Once Only Imagined tour. The record sort of started taking shape on the road, so some of the songs took some influence from the bands that we were touring with at the time which I think is really cool actually because they are actually all really good bands, like Arsis, Enslaved and Sonata Artica. And once we got home, we took a little break to sort of relax after touring and we started just really working hard writing it and recording it and it took basically all of 2008 and then we were really pretty much ready to release by the end of 2008.

antiMusic: When you started writing, what was your mandate? First musically; I know you don't write the music, but from your standpoint were there areas that you wanted to go in or were there things that you wanted to do differently than the last record?

Alissa: Uh, I mean, for me it has always been a goal to go heavier. Not heavier like, "Oooh, let's be more brutal, or something", you know generic like that. To me, I wouldn't even say heavier, I'd just say more extreme. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but I really just appreciate extreme music and I don't think we necessarily had a specific goal in mind in terms of what we wanted the music to sound like. Like, yeah, you said Danny writes the music. I mean I write the melodies and rhythms for the vocals and stuff like that so I knew where I was going with that, but we basically just told ourselves that we weren't going to apply any sort of rules. We weren't going to care what it would be classified as. Not that we did before, but we definitely didn't this time. And we just sort of let it take shape and I know for me anyways, when I was recording my vocals, I just pretty much went with what I had. I mean even right up until the last day of the studio, I still didn't know what I was going to end up with. Then finally when I was done all of the recording I listen to the final product, I was like, man this is great. (laughs) This is exactly what I wanted, you know? (laughs)

antiMusic: So, lyrically, it seems like people were paying attention to your messages or at least what they interpreted them as being. Once you realized that you had found an audience, did that play at all into your lyrics-writing process?

Alissa: Yeah it did. In the age that we are in now, we have the ability to really be in close communication with our fans which is cool, you know because of Facebook and MySpace and that kind of stuff. And so when I was writing this album I actually asked fans if they were willing to contribute anything to the album because to me….you know we have people writing and telling us how our album helped inspire them through, you know, their parents getting divorced or a death in a family, or being a soldier in Afghanistan, or you know, just a break-up or just anything …hard times? You know? And to me that's really amazing that my art would be able to help someone like that and so I though, well okay, if these people are gaining so much from my album, I'm really happy to do that for them and maybe they could actually inspire me for the next album.

So I asked people to write in, just basically give me any ideas they could think of. Not even necessarily a song idea but tell me something that bothered you or tell me a political issue you fought against. Or tell me a personal story that you really feel like it needs to be expressed or anything like that and I got so much response from fans and from people writing in, it was really impressive.

And basically, yeah, I didn't end up using any one specific subject matter for any one specific song but overall I really got inspired. Specifically a couple stuck out that I really did use them as a basis for writing certain songs on the album. And yeah, that to me is just really amazing that I can have this give and take with fans. Obviously the Internet has demolished the record industry in a lot of ways but in some ways…in this sense it's a really cool tool to have. I mean, my lyrics I think are probably even more abstract on this album than they were on the last but I think I like to write that way, because I don't want to be telling people what to do. I wanted to just get a message across through a beautiful song, so that's kind of what I ended up doing on this album.

antiMusic: Putting "Swan Lake" aside for the moment, was there anything vocally that you wanted to do more of, less of or initiate?

Alissa: I think, to be honest, when I went into the studio, there were maybe only three or four songs that were completely written and all the other ones still needed to be solidified and so I really just told myself to not think of anything. Like at that point, you know I had been on the road, I had been through a lot. I wanted to just go nuts. I didn't want to hold myself to any sort of boundaries or groupings. I was like, you know what? I can sing and I can scream and I can do any variation of both so I pretty much let the lyrics dictate what I was going to do, you know. So if I wrote lyrics and these particular lyrics felt like they needed to be screamed, then I did it. If they felt like they needed to be, you knew, growled, then I did that. If they felt like they needed to be sung, then I did that. And I sort of used that to dictate the melody. It was sort of a really cool organic, not limited experience, which is something that I really love about metal because I don't really know many types of music where I can just do whatever the hell I want and get away with it. (laughs)

antiMusic: You sort of answered my next question which was generally speaking how do you sort out which vocal parts are clean and which are the growly parts? As you say, this time the lyrics dictated which fall into which category but were there times when you stepped up to the mike and went, "No, this doesn't feel quite right. I'm going to growl this one."

Alissa: It happened a couple times where I would try, you know, maybe I'll growl this instead, maybe I'll sing this instead, but for the most part it's just whatever feels best. Whatever does best for the song. Whatever comes most naturally for the song, is what I end up doing.

antiMusic: Let's talk about the songs: You can interpret your lyrics in a number of ways. Can you tell us about what you're trying to say in "The Tempest"?

Alissa: Yeah. "The Tempest" is actually, I mean, all of my songs have a personal trigger, an event in my life that triggered me to want to write about something. Obviously, that's not something I'm going to get into too much. But yeah, with "The Tempest", I have a huge appreciation and love for the ocean and I just always have since I was a kid. So I kind of use that as a basis for writing a song about…I guess it's about, you know, without sounding too cheesy (chuckle), going through an emotional tempest, having a series of events in your life that are just not adding up, not connecting and they're not working out.

Basically, the song is written in a form of a person having a conversation with the ocean that they're currently drowning in. So there's a few different speakers. There's a sort of narration speaker and then there's this person who's just falling deeper and deeper into the ocean. And then there's the ocean itself speaking to that person and encouraging them to let themselves be drowned and fall under the surface. As well the person is sort of wondering in circles. Wondering if it's worth it to keep fighting or if they should just allow themselves to be taken out with the tide, you know? And to me that really like hits home because like I said, there's something really spiritual about the ocean and just being in the ocean and I just love going there. I was there earlier this week (laughs) which I'm really happy about. Yeah, it really, there's something that's just really…it's so natural and so powerful and it's just the same as a human emotion. It's so natural and powerful you can't fight it. Just like you don't stand a chance against the ocean. That's the basics of it right there.

antiMusic: That's really cool. "Eulogies…" is an awesome track. I love that false start off the top. Was that scripted or something that just happened?

Alissa: Yeah, it's funny because I mean, just because you're in the studio for so long, you know, things happen. I mean, what the producer Christian Donaldson did is, every time I do that, the light is obviously on and it's recording and so he always ends up doing is instead of taping over them and trying again, doing another take…he collects them all and then compiles them all into some really weird (laughs) track. And he'll stick that track when we least expect it and he'll like put it in before a real track or he'll stick it in at the end of another track and so yeah, our rough mixes have these weird sounds coming out. And so for "…Eulogies", he had a big, huge pile of me just "Uhhhh. Okay, try it again." "No no …." Just me and my outtakes basically. And we got so used to hearing that at the beginning of the song, we were like, "Wait a second. You know, that kind of fits the song." So we took out most of them; we just left one of them there but yeah, that was a totally natural thing. That wasn't planned at all. That just happened. (laughs)

antiMusic: I love it. Whose idea was it to use Youri Raymond on this track and why?

Alissa: That was my idea because I played a show with Youri in my first band years and years ago and I thought he was just a f***ing incredible vocalist and incredible guitar player. And I really, really respected him as a musician. So I kept in touch with him ever since then and I really wanted to have a guest vocalist and I was originally thinking of having Maynard Moore from the Plasmarifle. Then I was like, I'd rather get somebody who can do something that I can't because I don't want somebody who can sing. I don't want somebody who can scream. I want somebody who can do something totally different that I can't do. And Youri has this vocal technique that I would describe as corpse-core (laughs). It's just really awesome. So I just said, do whatever you want, make it your own thing. The only thing I'm asking is that you do something I can't do. Don't do something that I can already do. So, yeah, he just went crazy with it. What he did was really, really cool. It really fits the sort of chaos and claustrophobia of the rest of the song.

antiMusic: Absolutely. What is "…Eulogies" about?

Alissa: The basis of that song was about a Dickens poem I really, really like because of how it's talking about death in the past tense because talking about death in the past tense doesn't exist obviously (laughs). So I really thought that was cool. And I liked the way that the title was the opening line so I originally wanted to have a eulogy be the opening line. And that's originally how I wrote it. But then, things got changed around and that line isn't actually used really in the song per se. I mean it's there in the chorus, but it's not used word for word. And yeah, it can be taken two ways. I like how things can have double entendres. It's basically about a person at their own funeral, lying in their casket and listening to people sob over them. Basically allowing the funeral service to be their sort of lullaby to finally go to sleep and end their life and have some closure and trying to examine death in a peaceful way rather than in a scary way.

Because for me, I have this existential crisis of this huge fear of death. Like I'm not scared of much but death is something that's very scary for me. So I want to sit down and use the album as a sort of philosophical outlet, trying to explore the concept of death. This song is like one of those experiments. So it can be taken in the way of the first sense and it can also be taken in the sense of…while I was on the Once Only Imagined tour, I had a lot of death in the family who died when I was out on the road and I couldn't be there for the funerals. It's hard being on the road and just thinking about OK, being on the road at this time was hard but what was going on at home was much harder. So I was just exploring that in a sort of twisted, anguished way.

antiMusic: "Thank you Pain" is simply amazing. Your vocal is outstanding.

Alissa: Thank you very much.

antiMusic: Again, I'm not trying to pry, but is this about a bad relationship?

Alissa: Uhm, it's definitely a personal matter which I'm not going to get into but…

antiMusic: Just the line that jumped out "you let taboo human chemistry blind your needs".

Alissa: Yeah, yeah. (laughs) This song, this song is really, really close to me. I was even hesitant about using it as the single to do the video for it just because it's so personal and, but then, you know, we were like, well you know what maybe the performance was helped by it being so personal. So we decided to use it as the single and I really wanted to make sure the video was perfect for it so we struggled a little bit with the video too. Yeah, I always try to bring personal things to a more general level so that I don't end up revealing too much about myself. Also so that people can relate to it on their own terms. I wanted to stage it in the judicial system and justice in general and how sometimes things are based on the power of being a jury, quote unquote. Literally with some people, their decisions ultimately design the future for everyone involved. So that song is really, really important. That's all I'm going to say about that. (laughs)

antiMusic: What can you tell us about "Birds Elope With the Sun"?

Alissa: That was actually inspired by a poem that a friend of mine wrote, that I thought was really cool. They had used the finality of winter as the aging process. They had sort of described the way that they felt that they were getting older and growing into their winter years. So I wanted to sort of…and I don't personally feel that way but being Canadian we do experience winter (laughs). It's definitely a period in anyone's life where they do feel cold and isolate…in the wintertime. I wanted to really venture away from having a really strong message in it. I went towards lots of imagery; lots of allegory. That song is basically a really sort of intense description of wintertime, seasonal. And I really focused on my poetry more than my message in that song just because it felt good to get it out that way. Yeah, it's really sort of descriptive, if I could illustrate in a painting what a person's personal winter would feel like.

antiMusic: I love your growly stuff but I think my favorite song on the record is "Waiting Out the Winter". My god, do I love this song. Thank you so much for making this. One might guess you're talking about dictators. Could be in governments, religious groups or relationships. Can you tell us which this is, if any?

Alissa: Yeah. Yeah. That's all pretty good guesses. That song actually is different from the rest of the album, hugely in part because the music for it was actually written and performed, the guitar, drums and bass by Simon our drummer. It wasn't actually even Danny that wrote that. It was Simon that played it all and that wrote it all. I just wrote my lyrics and I wrote my vocal parts but he did everything else. So he's actually a really great instrumentalist apart from drums. And yeah, that song has to do with the sense of authority, having an authority rule over you, government oppression. Even on a smaller scale, it doesn't even have to be a government. Anytime your freedom is compromised because you are forced to abide a certain set of rules, whether it be social or personal. Then it sort of puts you into this personal prison. That to me is a huge because, a caged mind won't survive so that song really came out of that idea.

antiMusic: What is "Martyr Art" about?

Alissa: I think I wrote the lyrics to that shortly after getting back from the Once Only Imagined tour. And that one is more or less, because I've been an artist all my life, without sounding too pretentious. I really didn't work a lot of usual teenage jobs. I was a muralist so I was being paid to paint. Then I became a singer, so I was going on tour and being paid to sing. I've always been just performing in one way or another, sharing art with people.

I mean art is something people are so passionate about and they get so attached to and I really know why. And that's because it's really, really difficult to say something unless you've done it and when people knock it as much as they have…I mean, there's painting. There's music. There's just been an incredible disrespect, and lack of appreciation out there. I mean back a few hundred centuries, artists were regarded as the doctors, the lawyers of society. They were the high class. They were the sought-out people. The poets, the painters were really, really respected.

Nowadays it's not considered anything. People don't care. And the appreciation for art has been so watered down and everyone is so desensitised that art itself is almost a dying art. And that's kind of what it's about. It was inspired by a French novelist. I know a lot of people call him a French Shakespeare. He wrote a book called The Unknown Masterpiece which is basically about a man who takes on, not really an assistant but some who's like a prodigy. And he's working on a painting because he doesn't feel like it's finished.

I've been there before too and it's basically where he can't feel like you can capture the beauty of this woman in this painting and he just doesn't want anyone to see it unless it's absolutely perfect. And in the end he ends up burning it down and burning himself because of his art. He wasn't accomplishing what he wanted to do. It's funny because, it might sound really strange but artists are eccentric (laughs) —and when you create something, it's your creation, you are the god of that universe and you become really strongly attached to it and that's how I feel about my art as well. It's difficult being in an art form that's so public and available to so many people that don't necessarily have the capacity to appreciate it. So that's kind of what that one was about.

antiMusic: "Globus Hystericus" seems very straight-forward. You're commenting on environmental issues. I love the lines:
"We improve what nature made. We'll challenge mountains, transplant lakes. There is no confirmed master plan. We do it just because we can". Anything to add to what you say in this song?

Alissa: Yeah. That's pretty much it. Obviously the title "Globus Hystericus", it could mean the world is gone crazy. That's also the medical term for that lump in your throat feeling. It's exactly the feeling I get when I think about the conditions in the world. So basically it's just a commentary on that and how the world and everything in it is just a part of it and nature as a whole. And what we're doing right now without even realizing.

We feel like we are the end of evolution. But I mean, dinosaurs ruled the world at one point and then they fell. Many people feel that there have been years and years of evolution and that we're perfect now or we don't have to evolve any more. And that basically the world is ours for the taking. Even in the Bible it says that God created man and it's sort of implied that the world was created for man. When really, I just feel like we're just a little glitch on the time line and we're just another set of mammals that are eventually going to fall. So really, I think that the world is something that people really take for granted. Not everybody of course. But that's something that's really easy to do since most of us live in this sheltered urban environment. Yeah, the world is something that we shouldn't be abusing such as we are.

antiMusic: "Swan Lake" is just outstanding and a great achievement for you. How did this type of song come into consideration for this record and can you take us through the planning and recording of it?

Alissa: Thank you. Well, I knew that we were going to put on an instrumental track but we were a bit rushed with the album so I was wondering what to do. I remembered that there was a piece that I had done in school, a spoken word piece that I had done over the music of Samuel Barber's "Adagio" because I had always loved that song. I couldn't find my lyrics and I couldn't find the recording that I had done. But I thought that maybe I could do something like that and it would be really interesting.

antiMusic: Then I thought, well spoken word as much as I like it, I felt a little bit lame about doing it. And I feel like I'm more of a singer than a poet; it's not really my discipline. Then I thought, hey maybe, whatever the music is, I could just sing it a capella because I've always loved a capella music.

Alissa: For years I've been just singing a lot of a capella stuff and playing around with harmonies with Melina Soochan who is the pianist and actually did all the orchestration on the record and who is my best friend as well. So I was originally going to do "Adagio" and then we couldn't get the rights to that so I thought, well I would still like to do a classical piece. I searched through a lot of Tchaikovsky and Chopin, the great composers. I finally thought, well you know what? "Swan Lake" was a childhood favourite for me. I love the emotion in it. It's a pretty simple structure as far as classical compositions go. So I got the score and song rights. I had Melina help me a little bit because I'm not trained in music at all. I had her help me read the sheet music and things like that. And then I took, whatever it was, 30-40 vocal tracks and got the strings and everything and just sang it.

antiMusic: So you never sang in a choir or had any kind of training as a kid?

Alissa: No.

antiMusic: Oh my God! That's simply amazing!

Alissa: (laughs) Thank you. It pretty well worked out. Like I said, we were sort of rushed at that point so I didn't have time to work it out as much as I would have liked but I'm still pretty happy with it.

antiMusic: What can you tell us about "The Sentient"?

Alissa: That's one of my more straight-forward Once Only Imagined type of songs. In the sense that I went through some things and I read up on some things that really made me feel that I really needed to vent, mostly about animal testing. So that was sort of the inspiration for that song. Also, when we were changing band names from The Tempest to The Agonist, one of the names we considered was The Sentient. So I really wanted to play on the idea that so many people use that as an excuse to why it's OK to treat animals less than humans. But nobody has any concrete evidence that animals are any less sentient than humans are. Any cat or dog owner is going to tell you that their pets know what they are doing which is basically the definition of being sentient. And I find there's a lot of hypocrisy in how people go about differentiating between animals and humans. And I just needed to get that out in the song.

antiMusic: What about "When The Bough Breaks"?

Alissa: That was actually inspired by, not a story about something that happened to me personally but to a friend of a friend of mine, that is extremely sad. Long story short. A girl got pregnant and was cast out of her family because she became pregnant before she got married. The father of the child abandoned her too. She got really stuck and ended up homeless and pregnant on the street. Because she had no pre-natal care she ended up going into labor on the street and ended up bleeding to death right there. Then the parents that had abandoned her felt so guilty that they decided to take her child in. Then again because she had no prenatal care, the child also ended up dying.

Who's to blame? Well, in a sense you can't really blame anyone but in this song I wanted to touch on the abortion issue a little bit. Because if this girl had felt OK about getting an abortion then she would probably still be alive and now as a result, she is dead and her child is also dead and the family is just torn apart. I didn't really want to make a pro-choice song but there's definitely that essence in there because I think it's just such a sad story.

I really feel that a man should not have a say when it comes to abortion. Maybe that's really feminist of me but a woman's body is her body and it's her life. Obviously the decision to keep or not keep a child is an important one but there's definitely priorities to think about. A girl who is 18 years old; is it worth her dying just so she wouldn't feel that she had committed a sin? I don't think so. So the song is pretty much that story and it just kind of took off from there.

antiMusic: Tell us about "Chlorpromazine".

Alissa: That one was one that was inspired by fans that wrote in. A lot of them wrote about mental illness and things like that. That's something that I've had to deal with in close proximity to me as well. To me, just like death is scary, that is really scary. Because I always thought, OK I don't know if I believe in a soul. I don't know if I believe in an after life or anything like that. But I definitely feel like my body isn't me. My body is a vehicle for me to move about on this planet. So if things happen to one's body, they're still themselves. So I thought, how far can you go and still be yourself? Say theoretically you could survive with no organs. You could lose your head and still be alive. You could live with just your torso and still be alive. What part of you that disappears means that you have disappeared?

So I was just wondering, what part of you is it? Is it your heart? Your brain? It's usually those two parts that it comes down to. So for me, I think it's really scary to think about. If you lose your arm, you can still be yourself. But if you lose your brain, you lose your mind, you're not yourself anymore. So to think about your brain abandoning you. To think about being mentally ill, is really a scary thought.

So somebody wrote into me about a situation in Quebec where orphans were being used to test drugs that were supposed to be used to be treating psychosis and problems of the brain. So basically there were all these people growing up who had been used, I don't like the term, but basically as guinea pigs. So there were all sorts of legal issues following that. And that, to me, was really shocking. I mean, people that use human brains almost as playthings….and Chlorpromazine was one of the drugs that was really responsible.

antiMusic: Which of your songs presents the most challenge for you live or does it depend on how you prepare the set list?

Alissa: Well, there are definitely songs that are harder and some that are easier. "Thank You Pain" is difficult live because the range is really huge on that song. "…Eulogies" is not too easy either because there's no room to breathe in it. It's not paced. But I'm very masochistic in that sense because I really want our songs to be challenging. I never consider what it's going to take to do it live. If I want a certain sound, that's the way I do it and I just assume that I'll be able to put it off live (laughs). So far it's been working out and that's kind of the attitude I take with it.

antiMusic: You're going to South America in a few weeks. Any reason in particular you're going over there at this time?

Alissa: They want us. It's as simple as that. I always tell the fans, if you want to see us, let us know and show us. Request us in your magazines and on your radio and TV shows because that is going to prove to the local promoters that we're worth booking. And basically that is what South America has done. They've all been very supportive of us and because of that, we're able to go over there and perform for them. Unfortunately it hasn't turned out that way yet with Europe.

antiMusic: Is there anything else about the record that you wanted to mention that I didn't ask you?

Alissa: No, just that if you like the band, buy the record and tell us and everybody else if you want us to play in your area. The more noise you make, the easier it will be for us to come and play for you.

Morley and antiMusic thank Alissa for taking the time to speak with us.