Interview with Billy Raffoul: ‘It’s like having a shotgun shell, it’s like all over the place…this is the first record I’ve ever made that encapsulates all my musical inspirations’

Toronto-based, award-winning singer Billy Raffoul will release his third full-length album For All These Years tomorrow (20 October), an honest and heartfelt offering that explores relationships past and present, family dynamics, addiction and grief.

As Raffoul describes his latest album: ‘It’s like having a shotgun shell, it’s like all over the place,’ he said. ‘There are songs for all over your day, month or year. It’s a collection of songs exploring different relationships and characters – one’s relationship with their father, a relationship with a loved one battling addiction and reminders of a past relationship that follow you around. There are love songs, sad songs, happy songs and even a couple for the gym (laughs). Apart from three collaborations with my brother Peter, I wrote this album on my own and spent a good amount of time living with each story until they felt ready. This is the first record I’ve ever made that encapsulates all my musical inspirations in one LP. I want you to hear and feel everything I do; this album encompasses the acoustic moments, the storyteller moments, and the really rambunctious rock moments. It was important for me to show all of those dynamics.’

The album marks an important shift for him: ‘I’ve never intentionally made an album like this before,’ he said. ‘I’ve written others that were out of my control but this time it was down to what song I wanted to make that day. ‘We Could Get High’ and ‘Michael’ are high points in the shows, so I wanted to put them on there, so that I could give them to people to listen to again afterwards.’

‘It’s about myself making my way through this music business, the want to be younger and innocent and youthful’

It seems appropriate for someone who has recently changed record labels to kick off the album with the track ‘Bliss’ which, on the surface, appears to be a love song but is actually about the music industry. The backbone riff almost has a cello-like quality to it, with Raffoul’s gravelly vocals shifting from wistful to angry and back throughout the track: ‘It was really methodical, I’d recently left my previous record label and I was looking at my catalogue and what people are attached to, it’s good how you can do that,’ he said. ‘I was making a joke to myself about writing a love song and I sat down in the middle of the night and wrote it! I didn’t have the riff then. I found a clip of it – I made it on my computer – just 20 seconds of the chorus, it was way high up (laughs), a falsetto thing with a drum loop. When I changed the key, I could sing it in my full voice. It’s about myself making my way through this music business, the want to be younger and innocent and youthful, not just your body but your mind. I was trying to remind myself why I wanted to do this.’

The album title is a reference to a lyric in the closing track, ‘Jim Carrey’, which chronicles the journey he’s had: ‘These songs echo all of my influences; the album has the singer-songwriter elements and pop-sensible style of writing, but it also nods to my earliest memories of falling in love with garage rock. It’s all there, so For All These Years was a good way to tie it together.’

The nine track album also features three tracks that he wrote with his brother Peter – ‘I Wish You Were Here’, ‘In My Arms’ and ‘Alligator’. ‘I Wish You Were Here’ is a gorgeous track, underpinned by a haunting, cinematic piano line played by his brother and a gospel-like intro, featuring the kind of emotive and honest storytelling we have come to expect from him. ‘The first lyric I wrote of this song was “Oh my dear, without you here. it’s been one hell of a year”, I think that sums it up, it’s been a hell of a few years,’ he said. ‘Peter and I, we write a lot together, we’d just watched ‘Interstellar’ by Christopher Nolan. (In which the protagonist, ex-NASA pilot Joseph Cooper, leaves his family behind to undertake a space mission in search of habitable planets.) When you watch something good, you’re in that place afterwards thinking about it, it’s in your head. Peter arpeggiated it on the piano and that’s how it started. The song is about loss in general, people tell me all the time that it reminds them of someone who passed but it can also be about missing someone.’

As the song kicks off: “I know you had to leave, but I don’t know why. I guess sometimes it’s better not to say goodbye. Does your heart it break, the same as mine? Now, the only way I see you’s if I close my eyes…”

Raffoul was surrounded by music right from the start in his hometown of Leamington, Canada. His father, Jody Raffoul, is a popular rock singer and his son picked up his first guitar at a young age and spent many hours practicing. ‘Music put food on the table for my family, and it was always there,’ he said. ‘I don’t look it at any differently than if your dad’s a lawyer and you become a lawyer. I’ve written a ton with my dad in the past. We got to do a few acoustic gigs this summer, it was cool.’ When I interviewed his brother Peter a couple of years ago, he mentioned how both brothers love getting up on stage with their dad when they’re home and that they enable their dad to knock off early to have a beer and when I tell him this, he laughs: ‘We do! Actually, he’s in town tomorrow.’

‘It’s the closest I can describe being around someone who is hurting themselves’

One of the standout tracks on the album for me is ‘Drive You Home’, a powerful song about addiction that combines delicate finger picking with a uptempo, almost salsa-like beat: ‘Addiction affects everyone at some level,’ he said. ‘I have a lot of family members who died of it or know people who have. I had the chorus lyric in my head one night. It’s a hard one to sing live, I think about the people who died from it or are struggling with it. It’s the closest I can describe being around someone who is hurting themselves.’

As the chorus goes: “Sometimes I wanna kill you if that bottle doesn’t. I wish I didn’t love you, but it’s not an option. I can never be the one to say, “It’s time to go”. But I’ll always be the one to drive you home. I’ll always be the one to drive you home. I’ll always be the one to drive you home.”

Heartbreak is a theme that recurs frequently in his songwriting, something that is encapsulated very neatly in ‘Tangerine’, which features the memorable lines “I bought myself a one-way ticket out of this heartbreak, so I can walk around this city scared to meet somebody with your name” and “memories made upon a shotgun”. He admits that writing such songs is ‘cathartic, for sure’: ‘I’m a sucker for a love song,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to find new ways to say it. When you break up with someone, the remnants of them and the relationship follow you around. In ‘Tangerine’, it’s their name. I wanted to sing about a terrible breakup, I tried to explore the feeling of what you lose after splitting, I thought the imagery was effective. I’m singing about the casualties of a lost relationship, the places that are hard to go, the movies that are hard to watch, and the songs that are hard to listen to. I was staying in Los Angeles when I wrote it, I was staying at a friend’s place. I didn’t even take a guitar, which is weird for me (laughs). I had to learn to play the piano part for ‘I Wish You Were Here’ as it’s Peter on the recording but I had to learn to play it live but I’m not a very good piano player. I ended up writing six or seven songs that week. It started with the guitar for ‘Tangerine’. When we recorded it, I just set up one microphone and did it. It’s so freeing in a way to do that, once it’s done, it’s done, I can’t make any more decisions. The take you hear is take three, I think. I remember leaving the studio so happy, I took three takes with me in the car and listened to them on the way home, this was the one I picked.’

‘I like the seasons affecting guitars, that’s something my father taught me’

Typically, he writes his song on the acoustic guitar: ‘70% or 80% of the album was written on an acoustic guitar. ‘In My Arms’ and ‘Alligator’ were written on the electric guitar.’ I ask him what his dream guitar would be: ‘It’s a tough one! I don’t think I’d want something that someone had owned, I’d want to play it (laughs). If it was an old one, I wouldn’t want it to be worth a car! I think my dream guitar would be a Martin D-18 owned by both Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith. I think it’s in the Martin museum, so you can’t actually buy it. I have one guitar I’ve been working on for 10 years, it’s really aged, it’s a Martin D-28, an acoustic one. The majority of the songs have been written on it. Over time, the guitar starts to open out, the wood dries out and, with the seasons, it keeps drying. It’s a bit moister in the summer. I like the seasons affecting guitars, that’s something my father taught me.’

It’s the same guitar he squirrelled away from his dad as soon as it was brought home: ‘He’d just bought it and I took it! He bought it 11 years ago, I moved to Nashville and I took it with me, it’s a really good guitar (laughs). In 2020, I did a cool gig that made some money, and I bought him the holy grail of guitars, the Martin D-45. I told him: “Here’s your 28 back with interest!”‘

Elliott Smith has been a huge inspiration to him over the years: ‘I got into Elliott Smith pretty heavily for a big time,’ he said. ‘In high school, I was really into The Black Keys, The Who, Zeppelin and The White Stripes. I love Springsteen, all parts of his career, and Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Carole King. And Badfinger (a Welsh rock band from the 60’s), I’m a massive Peter Ham fan. I’m a sucker for the backstory, that sucks me in! (Two members committed suicide, another died of an aneurysm.) Bob Dylan has been a big influence, though you can’t love Dylan AND The Beatles,’ he joked. ‘I’ve done a deep dive in the past five years into his career, it’s been insane!’

‘At some point, every song on the album was my favourite’

He has been lucky enough to meet other musical heroes along the way: ‘In 2015, I got to open for Jeff Beck, he was super kind, that was cool. Paul Rogers (a Candian singer-songwriter) is a big influence, I got to meet him. Jimmy Page, at the Rock ‘N’ Roll Awards in Camden at the Roundhouse in London. I got to sit at the table with him! It was pretty amazing, it was like I was collecting yard birds (laughs). It was just a short interaction but he was super nice and cheery.’

Picking a favourite song on the album is an impossible task: ‘I like them all for different reasons, they all do different things to me,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘Lyrically, it’s the third record in a row where it’s all mine – other than the collaborations with Peter – that’s a good feeling. It feels so good to be able to say how the songs should be structured in that way. It’s good to have someone to say: “Hey, buddy, that line could be different” (laughs). At some point, every song on the album was my favourite.’

In 2017, he released his debut single ‘Driver’. Following the release of his ‘1975’ EP and ‘The Running Wild’ EP, he released his debut full-length, A Few More Hours, in 2020. His most popular single, ‘Acoustic’, has had almost 72 million streams on Spotify and in 2021, he won the SOCAN Songwriting Prize for the single ‘Western Skies’.

Some songs on the album hold extra significance for him, such as ‘I Can’t Love You Anymore’: ‘I’ve played it at so many bar gigs and anytime I auditioned for somebody,’ he said. ‘I finally wanted to give it to my hardcore fans. It’s about the end of a relationship when you’re not good for the other person and you don’t want to cause any further damage, its release was long overdue.’ It might just be the album’s emotional climax, with the acoustic guitar underpinning his gritty voice as he laments: “It’s alright, baby, but I can’t love you anymore”.

If he could go for a drink with anyone, he picks John Lennon: ‘That’s my whole childhood of music,’ he said. ‘Him or Paul, just to be the third person in the room. Such a duo, I’d just love to watch them work, I wouldn’t say anything!’

(Photo credit: Vanessa Heins.)