INTERVIEW: Boy Golden Contemplates The Best of Our Possible Lives

Boy Golden's sly, swaggering queer country often feels like a cosmic voyage. On his most recent album, Best Of Our Possible Lives, the Winnipeg-based artist guides us through a series of meditative loops that encourage us to embrace all facets of life. In our interview, Boy Golden discusses his relationship with religion, relationships, and forming a tight collaboration with artist Cat Clyde.

I noticed a theme throughout your work with a lot of religious, not even subtext, just...text. Your previous album, Church of Better Daze, played on a evangelical theme. Could you speak to how this topic became so centered in your work?

Yeah, I mean, it's maybe a little more sacrilegious than religious, right? That first album was kind of about, like, making my own sort of spiritual framework, which it was very tongue-in-cheek. Like that first record had a lot of weed smoking on it, you know. So I guess it's always just been an interest of mine.

I've always been really fascinated by religious texts. I really like religious symbolism, religious poetry, and even religious music, like gospel music. I only did one year of university, and I was doing jazz piano, but I just wasn't very good at it and I was too young to really do it properly, I think.

I had an excellent teacher and instead of like forcing me to do jazz, we mostly worked on gospel music. There's a lot of Black gospel music that I had never heard before because I grew up in Brandon, Manitoba. It's one of the whitest places imaginable. That was very eye-opening to me and always very moving. Even if it wasn't necessarily something I believed, it would make me feel so moved. I still feel really moved by some of those experiences.

I think that's where it comes from. I read a lot of religious and philosophical works of a whole bunch of different traditions. And there's some of it that resonates more than others, but I can often find something in whatever I'm reading or listening to.

Best of Our Possible Lives is very much influenced by your readings or learnings on Buddhism.

And Taoism as well. Zen Buddhism has been really influential for me over the past six years or so. Somewhere in there I picked up the Tao Te Ching and now I have like three different translations of it. Those ideas definitely make their way into my lyrics. I don't like set out to do that. It just sort of happens because some of the language is just really powerful and really compelling. And it's really sticky.

It just gets in me, then it comes out, I guess. I think whatever you're consuming probably will have an effect on your creative output one way or another.

"Suffer" is such an interesting illustration of that influence, right? It's very much a political song and pointing out things that we should be upset about. But at the same time, we all suffer.

That's pretty much stolen straight from the First Noble Truth. I didn't even make it different.

There is a misconception about some of those philosophies that are often about, like, acceptance of the world as it is and presence in the world as it is and acknowledging that we all suffer and that's a reality of life. It can sound like nihilism, but it's not.

If you read a little further into what your dharma or your karma might be, if you're going to take those words seriously, you come into this world with kind of a set of opportunities where if you are present and you practice right action and right speech and right thought, then you can affect positive change and you can lessen the suffering of others. And that's the lesson there, really.

And also that the suffering will pass. By the time we get to the end of the album, like, it's just beautiful.

Oh, thanks. Yeah, that is sweet. You know, can I, something that was on my mind the other day, because I was helping a friend of mine who has been through extreme hardship over the last few months. and recently lost her house in a house fire.

And so we were like just going around navigating social services and it's like incredibly frustrating and very slow. And I left that feeling like so hopeless and as I was walking around afterwards, people were walking by me and they were clearly having a good day. And I was like, How is it possible that the world is still going on and this is happening?

But that is happening all the time. And that's one of the hardest things to realize when some great tragedy is occurring and you have to continue and the world is continuing on. Despite that, you got to realize that, yeah, that's how it is. And also sometimes I'm the guy with the matcha leaving the coffee shop, having a good day and someone else is having a really horrible, horrible time.

You had Cat Clyde on two of your songs. I was wondering how that collaboration came about.

That collaboration felt like fate or something. We're really tight now as friends and as collaborators. We played the same festival and we played a jam stage together. I thought she would be too cool to hang out with me, but then a couple of weeks later she sent me a message on Instagram suggesting we collaborate. We only hung out for like two days, but we recorded six songs together. It was just total magic. And since then, she's become a person that I go to when I have a song that I'm working on and I'm stuck on something. And also we just go to each other for friendship. We're touring together as well in the next couple of months, which is something I've never done before. So that'll be super fun.

How you feel like your queer experience plays into the album?

It didn't come up as much in this album as it did on the last two. But I would say the closest that it would come is probably on "Best of Our Possible Lives," which to me is a manifesto of polyamory. It's rooted in a queer understanding of what relationship can be. To me, that song is about the deep understanding that the person that you're dealing with in relationship is a whole person and is going to have things that if they were to compromise on, it would somehow lessen their personhood.

That is what I'm always trying to avoid in relation with others. That includes my general feeling about relationships is not very hierarchical. I don't like to prioritize a romantic relationship over a deep friendship. There's many different kinds of forms a relationship can take. And in all of those forms, I'm always trying to give the other person as much agency and to be free within the realm of our relationship.

The song kind of plays with a couple kind of conflicting feelings that you have or that I have in relationships. Like it starts, "don't complicate my life." Well, I know that any relationship necessarily complicates your life, right? But "don't bring me down to your size." Well, in that case, I just don't want you to like dim whatever light I have going on and vice versa. I also don't want to dim whatever light you have going on. And then it's kind of like, let's make a deal. I won't ever tell a lie and I'll never waste your time by being someone who I'm not in this relationship. And I'm not going to make a compromise that bring that shrinks myself and neither should you. But come on with me where you will, like, join me on whatever parts of this journey, this life, feel right for you to join me. And in the best of all of our possible lives, maybe we end up side by side.

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