We recently featured Toronto artist Alanna Matty’s single, “End Up Alone,” here on GDW. Her insightful musings on the reasons relationships fail are but one facet of the topics she explores on the complete project. “This Past Year” is out today, available for streaming and download via Bandcamp.
Of the EP, Matty says, “This is an album about growth, about new love and old love, and about learning that putting yourself first is strength and not weakness. I wrote most of these songs after a really challenging year, and while you’d think they’d all be sad, the reality is that I learned how to stand up for myself for probably the first time and for that I will be forever grateful.”
“This Past Year” is Matty’s first album since 2014’s “Ante Meridiem.” This project exposes a more vulnerable side of Matty, with very personal lyrics matched with minimal home-recorded instrumentation, “It was nice to ignore the pressures of making it a big production, something about the stripped down sound is so much more genuine and endearing to me.”
Matty addresses some of the questions that many of us surely have asked when relationships end… was I good enough? What did I do wrong? “The Big Day,” which closes the album, is particularly resonant, delving into those mixed feelings when a former love commits to someone else, while “Loved You First” digs into the experience of seeing that former love grow, change, and even thrive in their new, separate life. It’s refreshing to hear an artist ask these questions – I look forward to hearing more from Alanna Matty.
Exposed to the wonders of CBC and Montréal Canadiens hockey as a teenager thanks to a satellite dish in rural Kansas, I have been an unabashed lover of all things Canadian ever since. I am a lifelong collector of esoteric and varied music, a teacher of piano, an avid reader, and a stamp/coin collector. In real life, I work in the field of technology.
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