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Indie folk songwriter and producer, Mike Legere is an indie-folk songwriter and producer now based out of Toronto, ON. After years spent playing with bands like Century Thief and Places Erupt, he embarked on his solo career in 2018. Soon after he began work on his new music, the studio he was working as an engineer at was destroyed by a flash flood. He took this chance to take an extended stay at his family cottage in Fox Harbour (now lovingly referred to as Quarantine Cottage) to write music.
At the end of an eight year relationship, Legere started writing the title track, “Memory Forming Clouds,” of his upcoming LP of the same name. He was sleeping on a futon during a heat wave, having daily panic attacks, and feeling like the world was collapsing around him. He wrote the verses gradually over a month-long period, as a way of making sense of the experience.
“When I first started writing the song, I felt sick to my stomach,” explains Legere. “Just processing the words and the intention of that fact that I had chosen to leave what was once a home, and a person who was my home for close to 10 years. I naturally felt out this staccato pulsating on my sister’s classical guitar, it felt like it mirrored my slightly inclined body leaning apprehensively forwards, fighting off a panic attack.”
The album was self-produced, and one of Legere’s intentions was to make sure he brought in some of his talented musician friends for this one, since he had made a point of doing the last one more independently. He brought in his pals Omar Shabbar, Colin McNalley, Adam Reid and Kathryn Kearns from Century Thief, his friend Greg O’Toole from Places Erupt, and a cellist he’d met on tour, Raphael Weinroth-Browne. With such a sentimental album, it only made sense to invite his pal Dante Matas, his brother Stewart Legere who played their grandfather’s old accordion for one of the songs, and his old friend from childhood Ryan McNeillwho came up to the cottage to visit me for a night and he added a guitar lick to the chaotic bridge in “Memory Forming Clouds.”
