There’s a long and harrowing history behind Canada’s government-mandated residential schools for the nation’s Indigenous population that would certainly take much more than a music news post to fully explain, though artists like Zoon are making an effort to set the record straight with regard to how that history unfolded. Their new LP Happy Thought School sees Anishinaabe-Canadian songwriter Daniel Monkman learning to process the events of their youth in a healthy way for the first time, noting how the unlikely support of one of their favorite actors paved the way for the record. “I was in Ireland with Kevin Drew from Broken Social Scene and Cillian Murphy came to one of our shows,” Monkman recalls. “On that tour I had a 10 minute dialogue about residential schools and how they messed up so many generations of our people. Cillian came to the green room after I was done and said, ‘The church did the exact same thing to us. Keep telling that story, you’ll do well here.’”
That story does, indeed, get told in a sense throughout Happy Thought School, with Monkman referring to writing the album’s latest single “I Was Younger” in something of a “flow state” that felt a bit like a judgement-free therapy session dedicated to digging into their experiences as a student. “It gave me that space to create in a meaningful way that made me feel comfortable,” they share of the track, which balances epically scaled dream-pop with the surrealist psychedelic smears of a Tobacco record. “It worked as a way to come to terms with how I was and being able to admit my failures in a relationship and how to even handle the next one. I definitely will try harder to be present, it’s just hard being a Native person who has gone through a whole lifetime of people bringing you down, so you don’t even know where up is.”
Regarding the album as a whole, Monkman adds of its therapeutic and emotionally reorienting results: “I knew this album was gonna be about me digging deep inside the emotional state of how I was during this time of my life. I was able to really hone in on certain flaws in my character. I tried to be easy on myself, because I know that being a Native American person in this country, a lot of hate is pushed toward me without me doing a single thing—just me existing makes people angry, scared, or mad. Sometimes just going into a store I would be followed by security guards, and that would push me into a state of anger. I now know that anger is not the way to be a positive influence to the younger generation, so if that anger comes out I turn that into something positive.”
Check out a visualizer for the track below, and pre-order Happy Thought School here ahead of its June 19 release via Paper Bag Records.
