Andy Shauf

Norm, the eighth album from singer-songwriter Andy Shauf, is a shimmering arc with unsettling silences that complete its story, the pop and hiss of a needle on a turntable after the song ends, emptiness like a trap door into something tender and terrifying. The Saskatchewan-born performer has already made a name for himself with television appearances and enviable reviews for his prior work, including his 2016 outing The Party, which The Sunday Times praised for “killer lyrics in music of extraordinary beauty,” and the night-at-a-bar drama of 2020’s The Neon Skyline, which Pitchfork called “a wistful, funny, and heartbreaking world.” With Norm, he’s upended his songwriting methods, creating a deeply haunting and unpredictable universe. It’s a classic Shauf premise to wonder whether we’re destined for disappointment and pain when people don’t love us the way we want them to. But he’s taking the question further this time. Many tracks on Norm start out delicate and forlorn, with the feel of classic torch songs. In the middle of a line, Shauf’s vocals shift unexpectedly to a higher, plaintive register. He sounds as if he’s sitting next to you, singing quietly in your ear, with the persuasive pining of Chet Baker, if Chet Baker sang in round Canadian vowels. But listen closely, and deep in the music, a shift happens as the world goes sideways. The tempo slows, vertigo slips in, or a discordant note appears. An uneasy clarinet phrase devolves into a busy signal. A lyric veers from a bird’s-eye-view to intimate thoughts. The result is a recognizable Shauf production, but with a flowing landscape of suppressed grooves propelling the songs toward uncertain destinations. He’s driving us out to a wild and dangerous place. The story takes shape through little epiphanies, accumulating like debris from a series of implosions. Norm’s cast of characters includes four voices in all. Three are narrators, inside whose perspective Shauf submerges us for one or more songs. The voice of a fourth character appears only via a memory of laughter and a single line, relayed by one of the narrators: “are we leaving the city?” Watching a David Lynch film one night, Shauf found inspiration for how to frame his concept. What appeared to be a nearly static camera shot of a key on a table continued uninterrupted for two minutes, then five minutes, then seven. It seemed impossible in its relentlessness, bordering on genius. Eventually, Shauf realized his browser had crashed and the movie had frozen. Enchanted by the sense of possibility and wonder that had made the film so vivid to him during that period of incomprehension, he wanted to create something similar. He deliberately left open spaces through which readers could enter to find the story and create meaning for themselves. Shauf hates talking on the phone, so, imagining someone different, he wrote “Telephone” (“i wish you’d call me on the telephone / i want to hear your voice / reaching late into the night”). The yearning intensity of the song went unusual places. It seemed worth keeping. Eventually, he came to another song – this one about someone named Norm (“oh boy norm / on his side / clutching the sofa / eyes open wide”). It became apparent that “Norm” might work well with “Telephone.” He had already written several other unrelated numbers, but he started to imagine a collection of songs which all existed inside the same world as Norm. Once he realized he did, in fact, have the makings of another concept album, he began revising the freestanding songs he’d written for the original idea of Norm. He bent and planed and carved them toward each other bit by bit, playing God and altering the lyrics until they had all been reengineered to belong in Norm’s universe. As he coaxed the songs for Norm away from their earlier, freestanding incarnations, he wanted to connect them without force-marching listeners through an obvious story. He felt unsure how far he needed to go to tie the tracks together. R