While audiences are only beginning to discover and immerse themselves in Creeping Thing, the new LP by Edmonton doomgaze trio Truster, their guitarist, vocalist, and only remaining founding member Stacy Burnett guides us through its symbolic language and shows us its — and her own — emotional edge, holding our hand as we walk right above it. It is the band’s first full-length in 10 years, released July 10.
Musiknights (MK): I’ve read that Creeping Thing is the first record that you created with the current lineup. How did the lineup change affect your songwriting?
Stacy: I had been playing with Kevin Wunderlich, our drummer, and Jordan LaFleche, our bassist, in another band called Feed Dogs. So, I knew that making music worked really well for us. Ultimately, Truster is a lot closer to the kind of music that the three of us spend more time listening to. We are a great fit.
MK: You describe your music as sad. Where does this sadness come from?
Stacy: Well, I see that a lot of people that I know have that… deep sadness. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me, a lot of it comes from just the state of the world, alienation, mental illness, and trauma. I also think that the saddest people I know are the funniest people I’ve ever met. You wouldn’t expect it, but my bandmates are both extremely funny, and I’m pretty funny, too. Most of what we do, even though the music is very emotionally impactful, is often laughing until we cry. That also draws us all together.
MK: If there were no sadness, what other emotion would be closest to you and your writing?
Stacy: I write a lot about vengeance, even though it’s not something that I want… but there’s a part of you that does. I like examining it and imagining what it would be like to do that, because it feels empowering. There’s definitely a big element of empowerment, of anger, of a strong sense of justice in our music.
But it’s good that you’ve mentioned sadness, actually. When I started writing lyrics in particular, I was quite a bit younger. I hadn’t really even been to therapy by then. I had a lot of unexamined experiences that I hadn’t really processed. Now, as I’ve gotten older and done a lot of therapy, the music that I write is coming more from a place of exploration and reclaiming power.
MK: You’re the one who writes the lyrics. How do you convey the emotion behind them to the rest of the band?
Stacy: Ultimately, it just comes down to trusting one another, each other’s creative processes, and wanting to be along for that together. When I share lyrics with them, I’m always met with a lot of support. It takes me a very long time to write lyrics. I find the process quite grueling, actually, because you’re accessing a different part of yourself that’s… intense and heavy.
MK: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that your new album has a religious theme. Why do you think it came up now?
Stacy: I think what happened is that I bought or I got a New Testament. I don’t remember exactly where I got it, but I ended up with one, flipping through it and going “Oh my god, this is so intense!” It’s not something that I believe in, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to know more about it. God is one example of what we ascribe our power to. All of that power and all of those feelings that you’re experiencing that you think are God are actually just you. Why would you give that away? Think of how powerful you could be if you took ownership of that. This album is a kind of an imagination or an exploration of what it could look like if you did reclaim that power for yourself.
My other band members have more experiences growing up in that world, either going to Catholic school or being in religious households. The three of us, ever since we played music as Truster, have always found that we’re always drawn to that imagery and those ideas. It was just natural that we would end up here.
MK: I’ve been to Edmonton once, and I noticed the city has a lot of churches. It made me wonder whether, aside from your religious background, the city itself pushes that feeling on you.
Stacy: Oh yeah. I live close to Church Street, and it has a huge number of churches per capita. It’s just a few blocks long, and it’s church, church, church. They’re beautiful, and they’re stunning. But personally, I grew up not religious. I grew up with my mom in recovery, and so we would go to meetings like AA and NA with her, where there’s a heavy religious undertone to everything. When I got older, and I was speaking to friends that grew up religious, I found that I had some of the same frameworks and knew some of the same prayers as them. My mom wasn’t an atheist, though, and she thought that it would be okay if we, my sister and I, got to know that world, but only when we were old enough to make up our minds.
MK: Getting back to the lyrics, I’ve noticed they mention hands more than almost any other image. Maybe it’s subconscious, maybe not. Do hands symbolize anything in particular here?
Stacy: I honestly never noticed that, but thank you. It really has a lot to do with a theme that this album has, as hands are mentioned in the Bible over and over again. Hands are a very active and engaged part of one’s body, and they’re often symbolic of the actions that one has taken. If something is in your hands, then it’s in your control, in your power. If you do something with your hands, you are doing something either for yourself or to yourself, for someone else or to someone else. Here, they symbolize not only one’s actions, but also one’s intentions.
MK: The New Testament was your reference for the lyrics, and what about the music?
Stacy: Our music is always influenced by what we are particularly inspired and moved by at that time. The three of us like a really wide array of music, having eclectic music tastes. I know that we all like music that’s a little bit more experimental as well. During our recording process, I remember bringing up Julie Doiron as inspiration for how I wanted the kick drum to sound. Even though she doesn’t play metal by any stretch of the imagination, the kick drum on her records is so imposing and heavy. I was more inspired by that than by the heaviness of metal or anything.
Recently, I’ve started to write again, but it’s going to be a long process. You know, Creeping Thing is our first full-length in 10 years (laughs). We like to move slowly and deliberately!
MK: Are you comfortable with the sound that you have now, and are there some other sonic areas that you would like to explore on future releases?
Stacy: I feel really proud of what we’ve made, and I don’t really think that it’s an album that sounds like much else that I’ve heard before. Of course, there are many recognizable elements, but the way it’s all come together, I’m really proud of it. And yeah, there’s so much that we would like to explore. I wouldn’t mind exploring the shoegaze element more. I wouldn’t mind going heavier either.
MK: What is the weirdest show you played or the weirdest place you played?
Stacy: (Starts to laugh) The weirdest show we played was probably here, in Edmonton. That was the festival by Common Ground Arts Society, focused on performing arts. They have a little bit more funding than a lot of shows that we play, so they actually fed us really well and all was great. But it was an outdoor show on one of those hottest days of the year, and it had to be moved at the last minute to the middle of a park with a big field, maybe because of the heat. And the only shade where people needed to sit (or they’d get sick) was across the whole field. So, first of all, our music is really heavy, and I would not consider it summer day or just daytime music. And secondly, we’re at one end of this field, playing, and at the far end of the field is everybody else watching us in the middle of the day… It was a very funny combination of circumstances.
MK: It was a real art performance, though.
Stacy: I guess it was!