In 2018, I was just over a year into my working relationship with Andrew Judah — and that’s when we spent a week together recording most of the foundation for Great Pink Heron. 

The songs were a mix of brand-new (two of which were only written two days before tracking began) and relatively ‘ancient’… and therefore, all of them were songs I wrote in my early 20s. 

Andrew and I booked a week together in November 2018 to track ‘Great Pink Heron’ — for months prior, I had built the whole album in my computer and my imagination. It had reoccurring motifs, track transitions, key-changes up the wazoo, syncopated drum parts, and well, it had a lot. Andrew and I’s job was to take those arrangements, and fill them with lively real-life performances. 

The statement Great PInk Heron was making, in hindsight, was “Common Fires is a full-band arranger”. I still make that statement in my music in many ways, but the feverish insanity contained on Great Pink Heron has since been quelled by a combination of further experience and a full-band songwriting outlet in my primary project ‘nightshades’ (with Andrew Judah, DL Ranney, and N. Sherman). 

It was a tremendous amount of fun. Those production times were illuminating to me, and were imbued with generosity from Andrew for his tolerance of the record’s scope (and my inexperience). I was honoured to work with Chloe Davidson, Zac Gauthier, N. Sherman, Kevin Dreger, and Danielle Miller, who lended their talents instrumentally and vocally. 

The album that began recording in 2018 wasn’t released until 5 years later, at the very end of 2023… it goes without saying that the record entered a special type of developmental hell due to 2020 - 2021 being tumultuous and confusing years for pretty much everyone on earth. By the time the record was complete, a half-decade had passed since the initial inspiration.

To me, it serves as a public journal entry cataloguing my mid-20s. Like a tattoo. An echo of a moment. Grandiose and unyielding in its own charming way — reaching earnestly to the stars to make an unholy racket. 

- CF