The New Canadiana #6: Princess Towers

Trying to find the place where music belongs

Jun 30, 2025

Welcome back to The New Canadiana, my quest in pursuit of the spirit of folk and country music in Canada right now.

Maybe you’re like me and have periodic crises of confidence around your creative practices. For me it’s the question of where my work belongs (something especially fraught for the terminally online). When what you’re doing is literally making something up, it’s pretty easy to loose track of where the art coming into existence can live. Who are my peers? What is my scene? Are these songs a part of something bigger, or just floating out there, pnowhere in particular.

This month I had the pleasure of speaking with Arden Rogalsky of Princess Towers about questions like these. Arden is based out of Montreal, grew up in Kingston, Ontario, studied in Halifax, but called in from the Vancouver area—a lovely biographical picture of what life in Canada can feel like: diffuse, diverse, but somehow still all connected together.

Instagram // Bandcamp // Spotify

And I want to know what you think.

Do music “scenes” really exist, or are they the romantic and retrospective constructions of memory? How can musicians cultivate a sense of community around their work?

Also: Arden will be playing some shows in the Vancouver area in July. If that’s where you will be, find the details at the bottom of the page.

And as always, be sure to give the official playlist of The New Canadiana a spin. With a great track from Princess Towers’ first album Remastered in Stereo (for fans of Andy Shauf and Big Thief) in the first position, this thing is chock-a-block with fresh Canadiana gold:

A Mythology of the Ordinary

Matthew Joel: Tell me about your most recent album, Freak Fairy Tales. It’s a bit of a departure from the first Princess Towers’ first album—a lot more stripped down.

Arden Rogalsky: Lately, I’ve been referring to this as my domestic period, which I think is my only period [laughs]. It’s the idea of just writing about objects in the house.

Matthew: That makes me think about this Picasso quote about how he stayed in each of his periods exactly as long as that approach to painting was adequate to what he wanted to express. If domestic objects are the vessel for you right now, what are you using them to explore?

Arden: I like writing about domestic objects because it’s possible to find a resonance with them. I like making this little metaphorical leap, identifying with an object and finding out how its little story also reflects my own story, or my own state of mind. They feel like these little loaded metaphors that I can see myself in. I guess, in the end, it’s more about the emotions and states of mind they feel related to in my own life than just the things on their own.

Matthew: It sounds a bit like you’re writing a mythology of the everyday.

Arden: Well, it’s interesting that you use that word, “mythology”, because that’s part of the title of the next Princess Towers project.

Matthew: How fitting!

Arden: I’m framing the next project as a collection of myths, which might be stretching that word because in the end they’re really stories where almost nothing happens. But these will be more hopeful, like, aspirational stories to live by.

Matthew: Will it still be about the domestic?

Arden: Yeah, but this time it will be about taking care of things around the house, and about taking care in a broader sense.

All-Purpose Cleaner and Deep Time

Matthew: My favourite song on Freak Fairy Tales is the sixth track, “Dust Buster”. I love that song. There’s this refrain about the all-purpose surface cleaner—this totally ordinary thing that really does take on a larger than life resonance for me. Tell me about the inspiration there.

Arden: In that song I was thinking a lot about this idea of deep time. I was living in a house with someone who collected fossils, and we had fossils everywhere in the house. I was thinking about them in the line about “long eons of time”, thinking about that kind of time scale connected with the small act of cleaning the house in the present. I liked the way that small act starts to seem like this grand thing, the same way it sometimes feels like a big act to become unstuck from a situation or a state of mind and feel free again.

Matthew: That makes a lot of sense to me. I love the idea of setting the ordinary and mundane against older things like rocks and fossils. That surface cleaner kind of becomes an image of what it’s like to be human in general—being busy on the surface of things, but also connected to something deeper.

Recording Freak Fairy Tales

Matthew: So tell me about how you recorded these songs. The first Princess Towers album, Remastered in Stereo, is such a crisp and carefully produced collection of songs with full band arrangements. But Freak Fairy Tales is you in the backyard with a Casio capturing things in a single take. Why did you decide to take that approach?

Arden: I had actually originally conceived of recording it in the same way with a band, but for whatever reason, I wasn’t feeling excited by the recordings I was working on. And there is a version of the album that’s like a band version, but since these were songs about being alone and feeling isolated, it made more sense to record just me singing them at home in the same way I had written them. I also just felt like I needed to close the project and not keep working on it. Dwelling on these songs and the themes that I’d been working with for the year before didn’t feel healthy to me anymore. I was about to move to Montreal, and I just felt like I needed to close this project before I left.

Matthew: That’s a nice way to pinpoint this collection of songs in a time and place—knowing, for instance, that this record of the songs occurred on this particular afternoon in this particular place at this particular time in your life.

Arden: In some ways, I have regrets about it because there are arrangements of these songs for a band that I really like and never had the chance to capture or release, but I’m at peace with it now as a more lo-fi thing that just captures this afternoon.

Matthew: Well, who knows, maybe for the 10-year anniversary of Freak Fairy Tales you can go back to the band arrangements to life. In 2033 we’ll look forward to that [laughs].

Songwriting and Particularity

Matthew: Your songs have been making me think of the way that our use of images in art can’t be limited to the intentions of the songwriter or artists because, in the end, the images have their own intelligence. Do you have that experience when you’re writing songs or listening to other people’s music?

Arden: Actually, for me, it might go in a different direction. Lately I’ve been finding it difficult to sing covers of other people’s songs. As much as I like listening to them, when I sing them myself, it doesn’t feel truthful. The song feels so specific to the person who wrote it, to what they’re doing, and not something that’s really universal. It feels so tied to their sensibility. The songs don’t seem like they can stand alone. I don’t know if this quite connects with what you’re asking, but I’ve been appreciating the ways that art feels so specific and hard to reproduce.

Matthew: Maybe these are complementary insights? When someone else’s art moves me, that already implies some sort of shared horizon on which these things can resonate. At the same time, I think you’re totally right. It often seems like things become more profound the more intensely particular they are. And actually, speaking of particular experiences and share horizons, this leads into the last question I want to ask you…

The New Canadiana

Matthew: What does The New Canadiana mean to you right now?

Arden: When I moved to Montreal, I think I expected to feel like I was part of a bigger scene or something. And I don’t think I really feel that way at this point. Having been there a while, I see that in reality there are many sides to music in this city, and a lot of different smaller scenes. So, if “The New Canadiana” implies a kind of shared sensibility or spirit or something, maybe that’s there, but I haven’t found it. I’ve been finding more people that I share a kindred sensibility with outside of Montreal. I’m not feeling part of a really specific scene or specific group of peers, but I do feel like I’m gradually finding the people I connect with mostly in other places. I’m inspired by a lot of Canadian musicians, like right now Andy Shauf is a songwriter I admire a lot. There’s a number of other great songwriters in that generation too, like The Weather Station and Charlotte Cornfield. I wonder if it’s possible to have a coherent scene in such a big place as Canada, where in even just one city there are so many different things going on all the time.

Matthew: Yeah, there is a sense of dislocation there. Is it an experience where, on the one hand, you look at Canadian music and see a diversity and not necessarily a shared experience, but on the other, you’re feeling drawn to artists in other places outside of the place where you are?

Arden: I guess I just haven’t had the experience of really feeling like part of a scene. And maybe I just have the wrong definition of that in my head. When I think of a scene, I think of, I don't know, the Toronto scene that Broken Social Scene came out of…

Matthew: Or Montreal circa 2009?

Arden: Yeah. And whatever that romanticized idea of what a scene is, I don’t think I’ve found it. But at the same time, things like this—you reaching out about this project—these feel like such valuable connections to have, and it’s what makes me feel excited about these upcoming shows next week here in BC. There will be friends from out here plus friends from Ontario. I’m so glad those worlds are gonna meet. I do feel really interested in building and finding more music communities, whether or not that’s in the city I live in. It feels exciting to get to know a bigger community of peers who I really admire and feel inspired by.

Matthew: I really identify. In some ways, that’s been the whole purpose of organizing these interviews. I started making music again after a long break and was trying to find out where my art fits. Like, what’s the context? This series is kind of about trying to enact that. I’m having conversations with the people like you who I know and who are making music I really like. I’m trying to draw the web of connections and sort of assert that it exists in a public way. I guess it’s an almost stubborn way of saying “This is it! Look at all these wonderful people making wonderful music. This is where I belong.” So thanks for being a part of that, Arden.

Arden: Thanks for having me!